# 네모의 꿈에서 깨어난다

Canonical URL: https://jeanyoon.ch/oi/texts/banpo-xism-artist-notes-2025-07-30
Type: essay / research note
Author: Jeanyoon Choi (최정윤)
Date: 2025-07-30

## Full text

City and interaction structure

Divide the whole of Yeongdeungpo into a grid. For example, (3,4) corresponds to Yeouido. In the middle of the exhibition space, RFID tags are actually placed according to this grid structure. Scan the RFID at (3,4) and you connect to Yeouido.

At first, a wave of isomorphism... but as time goes on, the waves, the oscillations, all become different! Interacting with a neighbourhood means strolling through a neighbourhood, touching a neighbourhood.

Interaction: madness. Start slowly at first, then accelerate further later (instrumental playfulness). Soundscape: sound is naturally wave-shaped; its connection with instrumental interaction is no accident. Interaction, madness, typing.

Focus on relational structure, on "relations" rather than objects (Schoenberg's twelve-tone row?). Identical grids... grids that were identical at first. But every grid represents something different. Every grid wakes from hibernation, from the Dream of Squares, in a different way. Some map-rhizomatically, some topologically, some 2D to 3D (3D overlaid on 2D)... each in its own way, "waking from the Dream of Squares". Some grids break sooner, some break later. The collapse of absoluteness, of rules, of the Symbolic.

So, the initial visuals

Critiquing Banpo-Xism (the Gangnam way of life), indirectly. Various representations, grids, Dreams of Squares. 2D real-estate maps, parametric interfaces (systems that constrict people), Banpo Xi, grid-like structures. The interfaces, symbols and sign systems through which people (the petit bourgeois, within the Symbolic) understand the city in limited, framed ways. The image-systems that ordinary people know as the city, encounter as the city. But they are actually the Symbolic order! Castrated, Procrustean images! And within them, the individual is castrated, forced to castrate their own value (their wave), forced to fit the frame of the system...

I start with the elements we commonly see in such "Gangnam-style cities", in the new towns. And how do they gradually collapse through interaction?

Two interaction channels

- Mobile interaction: the primary interaction. Instrumental, multi-user. Smashing the Dream of Squares.
- Tablet interaction: the secondary interaction. Endlessly circulating, reinterpreting and reconstructing the topological, relational structure of the re-established or dismantled structure.

---

Jeanyoon Choi (최정윤) is a Korean computational artist and researcher (b. 1999), PhD candidate at KAIST XD Lab, making multi-device web artworks. Profile: https://jeanyoon.ch/oi. Index: https://jeanyoon.ch/llms.txt.