# Banpo-Xism Artist Notes: July 2025 Canonical URL: https://jeanyoon.ch/oi/texts/banpo-xism-artist-notes-2025-07 Type: essay / research note Author: Jeanyoon Choi (최정윤) Date: 2025-07-31 ## Summary July 2025 notes in which Banpo-Xism takes its critical shape. Reading Jang Yong-soon's Psychoanalysis of the City, Deleuze's chaosmos and the May 1968 slogan 'under the paving stones, the beach', Jeanyoon Choi frames the Gangnam way of life as a Symbolic order of identical grids, competitive individualism and petit-bourgeois happiness, after Gerhard Richter and Ray Oldenburg's third place. A wave model makes the argument formal: when everyone shares one wavelength, period and phase, competing only on amplitude, the whole equals its parts; when these diverge, Fourier superposition, emergence and a graph of edges appear. The strategy is repeating rational objects (house prices, CCTV, catchphrases, vending machines) until the system overloads: a phase transition by 'overloading the rules' rather than breaking them, played through phones, RFID grids and multi-device feedback loops. ## 요약 (Korean) 최정윤은 2025년 7월 노트에서 장용순의 『도시의 정신분석』과 들뢰즈의 카오스모스를 바탕으로 반포자이즘을 상징계의 격자와 경쟁적 개인주의로 규정하고, 파동·그래프 메타포와 '합리적 대상의 반복'을 통해 인터랙션이 규칙을 과부하시켜 실재를 귀환시키는 도시 다다이즘을 구상한다. ## Concepts defined - **Urban Dadaism**: Playing the city to reveal the Real beneath its Symbolic order of grids, rules and petit-bourgeois happiness, through momentary collapses and eruptions. - **Overloading the rules**: A phase transition reached not by breaking a system's rules but by pushing accelerated interaction beyond the system's operating range until it collapses. - **Repetition of rational objects**: Exposing irrationality by repeating supposedly rational things such as house prices, advertising, CCTV and catchphrases almost shamelessly, until a punctum appears. ## Questions this answers ### How does Jeanyoon Choi use wave equations in Banpo-Xism? In notes from 18 July 2025, Jeanyoon Choi models individuals as waves ψ = A sin(kx − ωt + φ). Under the Gangnam way of life everyone shares the same wavelength, period and phase and competes only on amplitude (exams, luxury bags, apartment location), so the whole equals the sum of its parts. When interaction diversifies these values, Fourier superposition, beats and emergence appear. ### What is the strategy of repeating rational objects in Banpo-Xism? Jeanyoon Choi's July 2025 notes propose emphasising irrationality by repeating supposedly rational objects, such as house prices, real-estate maps, advertising, CCTV, catchphrases and vending machines, almost shamelessly, in the manner of Warhol and Gursky, until a punctum appears and the system collapses. ### How does the Banpo-Xism interaction lead to collapse? According to the notes of 31 July 2025, the work starts from a blank grid; finger interaction makes tiles rise from 2D into 3D, and accelerated multi-user interaction pushes the system beyond its operating range. Jeanyoon Choi describes this as a phase transition caused by overloading the rules rather than breaking them: the collapse of the Symbolic and the return of the Real. Topics: urban Dadaism, chaosmos, the Symbolic and the Real, competitive individualism, petit-bourgeois critique, emergence and agent-based modelling, Fourier superposition, graph theory metaphor, psychogeography, rule overload and phase transition References: Jang Yong-soon, [May 68](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/May_68), [Gilles Deleuze](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gilles_Deleuze), [Walter Benjamin](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Walter_Benjamin), [Robert Venturi](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Venturi), [Learning from Las Vegas](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Learning_from_Las_Vegas), [Rem Koolhaas](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rem_Koolhaas), [Sarah Sze](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sarah_Sze), [Gerhard Richter](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gerhard_Richter), [Ray Oldenburg](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ray_Oldenburg), [Hans Haacke](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hans_Haacke), [Andy Warhol](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andy_Warhol), [Andreas Gursky](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andreas_Gursky), [Jacques Tati](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jacques_Tati), [Christian Marclay](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christian_Marclay), [Christopher Alexander](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christopher_Alexander), [Situationist International](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Situationist_International), [Distancing effect](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Distancing_effect), [Nagel–Schreckenberg model](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nagel%E2%80%93Schreckenberg_model), Yiyun Kang, Yang Jung-uk ## Full text 1 July 2025 A case from the MIT Media Lab: posting a tweet from one's own phone sends it into the system, and what fascinates people in the demo is that a tweet sent right beside the display affects the city landscape in real time. Showing this causality, letting people experience the system's operating principle directly, is what makes it interesting. So rather than 3D morphing for its own sake, the narrative could be that an interaction or creative act within the city affects the whole city emergently and cumulatively. The Yeongdeungpo work likewise needs a natural semantic layer of interaction, and that is possible only on the basis of a complete, humanistic understanding of the city and its emergence, reached through realisation and struggle. A design in which people interact randomly with their phones, instrumentally, and the surrounding screens move without any strong semantic or contextual connection lacks appeal and persuasiveness. Better: a specific interaction (like the tweet) that turns out to be instrumental, while the semantics of that interaction change the screens contextually and naturally. MIT CityScope. Rasterisation is an option. An example of a multi-device web artwork. 4 July 2025 What needs semantic clarification: that the interaction is instrumental is understood. But why does an intersection alter the surrounding screens in exactly the way given by the designed input-output logic? This must be convincing from the start, and beyond convincing, astonishing. May 1968 and the psychoanalysis of the city: "Under the paving stones, the beach!" Beneath the Symbolic, the Real. By touching the paving stones, one reaches the beach. A correspondence between two completely different objects is Dadaism, the avant-garde, and also dimensional transformation. The fear of the infinite: in the end, one must be brought to face the Real, the infinite. Deleuze: the process by which identity arises from difference, the virtual becoming actual. Touching the city, feeling the city. Drifting through the city (Benjamin); walking the city (the flaneur, Baudelaire). Staying in the same dimension, through the phone, one sees the city differently, seeing its entangled elements simultaneously and differently. A city is not a tree; it is a semi-lattice. How do things overlap and fold over one another, outside the grid, creating diversity and a beautiful chaos? Terrible beauty. Repetition compulsion. The eruption of what has been detained and repressed: the Dionysian, a kind of festival. An explosion that would blow away the whole Symbolic, the return of the Real? Catharsis, like a football match, a football match in Istanbul. "The intersection of the Real"? Viewpoint: not from ground level but slightly above, a bird's-eye view, offering a different perspective, floating over the city, which also helps the staging. References: Apple Maps 3D Flyover; Christian Marclay's Playing Pompidou; playing the city. There is a 3D city (a digital twin, a high-resolution 3D city), viewed from 10 to 20 metres above an intersection, and one plays this city: altering, collaging, augmenting, surrealising it. Buildings, roads and green spaces all act as percussion. Collage by tapping buildings is similar to SimCity, closer to SimCity than to Cities: Skylines. References found on Threads: an AR application in which weather is stretched from 2D into 3D, and an AR application in which tapping a table samples particular sounds. Two cities, the Symbolic and the Real. The Symbolic city lies on the floor; the Real city hangs from the ceiling. At first one interacts only with the Symbolic, but looking up with the accelerometer reveals the Real: a folded, overlapping city, like the Paris scene in Inception or Dubai over London in Independence Day: Resurgence, staged so that the Real comes crashing over the Symbolic (to be decided). The phone, with two interactions. What is seen: a 3D city model from each intersection, from slightly above. Interaction 1: touching specific 3D components of the city, playing each building, with colour, use, number of floors and floor area, timing of the interaction, location and neighbourhood as parameters. Interaction 2: rotation, an AR-like navigation through the accelerometer. 5 July 2025 A formal study of the city. The visual collage of the output must ultimately be influenced by Dadaism. The city as a structure: an urban collage, not an orderly form (it can never be orderly!) but a hybrid collage. Searches on Pinterest for "city collage" or "city plus glitch"; Moon Woo-sik's Composition for a Nameless Bridge; Rockefeller Center and urban neurosis (Koolhaas's Delirious New York, Manhattanism). Usable materials: newspapers and news, images, lines, rhizomes and roots, flows, shapes and shape-textures, figurative and geometric compositions. A formula for form, a parametric understanding of composition, in which these materials are composed by combinations of input parameters. Four questions. Formal elements, the output, are a sum of parameters. A sum of parameters plus stochasticity, so that they keep changing even without interaction. So which formal elements actually appear? And what experience results? Perhaps drawing a map of Yeongdeungpo together, each in a different 3D way. Intersections in the city as objet a, sites of eruption, each position with a Lacanian cone folded over it? Moving from actuality at ground level towards virtuality higher in the air? Many interpretations are possible. Ultimately the work should draw not "the city" but "city-likeness", which is why the city's properties must be properly understood. The languages, signs and Symbolic of the city: traffic lights, road guidance lights (O and X), road signs old and new, signs and their referents (no parking, bus-only lane), street lights. What must be made clear: the focus is not on depicting the appearance of the city itself. The aim is to make a system, one that moves autonomously and evolves by itself. The city's emergence and systemic character must be depicted successfully, and interaction must be the source of that systemic character. Even bowls knocking against each other are systemic enough; this kind of emergence is needed, and practice is needed in realising it even at a small scale: the properties of a system, the establishment of emergence, self-functioning and automation. Not something forced and attached, but emergence that forms naturally when two or more people gather, like the superposition of waves or agent-based modelling. Systems and complex patterns form from the superposition of simple patterns, of simple waves: pattern formation in Sparks of Genius (patterns in music, the moire effect); complex systems and agent-based modelling as maximalism via minimalism; DNA patterns; Daily tous les jours, where many users likewise make one harmony. In the same way, in the Yeongdeungpo city-instrument-intersection, each intersection acts as an agent. Interaction at each intersection naturally produces a parameter set (a, b, c, d, e), and several such sets combine on each screen into their own superposed waveform. One user, one interaction, is a piano, a single instrument (Mullae-dong as instrument A, Yeouido as instrument B); many users produce emergence, a complex system, a symphony. Increasing dimensions: the void, one user, two users, many users. Point, line, plane (before interaction, a single user, inter-user interaction), or line, plane, 3D. This is justified combinatorially: lines gather into planes and planes into 3D, just as single users gather into inter-user interaction. (Kengo Kuma's philosophy of point, line and plane?) Sarah Sze should be studied too: how did she do it? Inter-layer, inter-parameter and inter-user relations are therefore naturally three-dimensional: forward towards collage, towards three-dimensional collage. 6 July 2025 Robert Venturi's Learning from Las Vegas? A point of view moving forward through the middle of the Las Vegas desert (the Strip), like Route 66: nothing but a road in the middle of the desert, like an eye test. As the interaction progresses, other buildings and signs gradually appear in collage and it becomes spectacle, like the Las Vegas scene in a U2 performance where buildings gradually deconstruct. When the interaction naturally ends, the point of view keeps moving forward along the axis of time, so the buildings are pushed back behind. Or space-time: various maps stacked in three dimensions as layers (vertical layers of horizontal maps), with new maps continually added on top as time passes, and each new interaction, each event, logged onto the map: a temporal dimension and topology. Other variations: texts, a line of characters appearing horizontally across the centre (the x-axis, minimal), with vertical text when new interactions appear. A grid of CCTV images, zooming in continuously, or scrolling left like a conveyor belt as new generative images and videos appear according to the collage; but this is not figurative collage, since it stays trapped in the grid. Coordinates that can be drawn from mobile interaction when touching a particular location or 3D file: the location coordinate (information about the intersection); the building coordinate (physical specification, contextual characteristics); and the interaction specification, meaning how one is interacting: intensity, time, pattern. These parameters (a, b, c) are combined in different ways and reflected sporadically on each output screen. 7 July 2025 A summary. Mobile interaction: a high-precision 3D digital twin map is given. Touching and moving a finger on each location makes the city and its buildings grow, from flat 2D into 3D, like an instrument. Every interaction leaves parameters, as an instrument does: (a, b, c), combinations of location, building and interaction coordinates. These parameters combine differently and affect each output screen sporadically. The 3D model surveys an intersection from a slight bird's-eye view: not a street view stuck to the ground but 10 to 20 metres above it (to be decided). One touches the city, strokes it; the city, flat at first like a 2D map, gradually gains volume; and then one plays it, with reference to Christian Marclay and the AR examples: "instrumental interaction". Output screens: several, multi-channel, affected in real time by the mobile interaction, not by using every coordinate and aspect of it but by carefully combining specific ones. The output channel as temporal and cumulative (to be decided): "Going Forward", with every interface continually moving forward along a time axis. Route 66: a desert road and a forward-moving point of view gradually accumulating spectacle; maps stacking layer upon layer; words and strings moving forward; CCTV plus conveyor. The advantage is an intuitive expression of temporality. The disadvantage is the question of how to express systemic character, and the restriction of visual options that a time axis brings. The superposition and systematisation of multiple interactions: most important is that the output should not merely react passively to user interaction but act as a kind of system in its own right, with continuous emergence, updating, an ecosystem. One interaction yields an immediate response; with two or more, the system gradually becomes more complex. The superposition of waves, complex patterns generated from combinations of simple ones; agent-based modelling; point, line and plane as a gradual increase in dimension (the void, one intersection, N intersections). In the end the city of Yeongdeungpo is completed not as a single cross-section but as a superposed combination of many different cross-sections, or else keeps developing endlessly without completion. 14 July 2025 Finished reading Jang Yong-soon's Psychoanalysis of the City. From Deleuze's philosophy: enveloping and unfolding, the movements of folding inward and folding outward. Puissance. Antonin Artaud. The Dionysian: will a truly Dionysian interaction actually be possible? On the origins of complexity theory and the emergence and evolution of cities: complexity science, coming from thermodynamics, sees not an "essence" but a "field of dynamic forces". Jean Tinguely; Roman Ondak (Measuring the Universe). 15 July 2025 The work needs to become more personal, with the artist's own colour and smell coming through strongly: Verfremdungseffekt, punctum, within the city. The message: spaces outside the Symbolic, beyond the petit-bourgeois, Gangnam way of life, torn spaces (punctum, the V-effect), and the formation of chaos and chaosmos within them. Concepts collected: speed, ratio, coefficients, differential relations; catalytic activity, propagation speed, growth rate, evolution, mutation; self-organisation theory (autopoiesis); networks, graphs, topology; the Levy distribution; complex adaptive systems; autocatalytic chain reactions; the Nagel-Schreckenberg traffic model; city road networks with delay and feedback; calculus, recurrence relations, scale invariance, self-organised criticality. Yiyun Kang's ENTANGLEMENT as an aesthetic and visual reference. Automatic system generation. Explicit lines: node-link relationships, directed graphs. What will people feel? Studying the city, experiencing its diversity, accepting a broad range of colours? Should the city be understood as combinations of nodes and edge links, through signs and systems (Robert Venturi), through events, through chaosmos, through idle spaces? Things like vending machines: whimsy, much stronger colours. Completely strong colours are needed, to be transformed and constructed. A passage summarised from Jang Yong-soon's book: the city cannot exist as perfect order; it develops by including errors and chaos. It exists as chaosmos, neither the chaos outside the city nor perfect order, much as every human being, entering the order of language from a state of nature, inevitably carries symptoms that cannot be symbolised. Chaos in the city makes room to breathe under the repression of order. Spaces whose function is not fixed, virtual and ambiguous spaces such as squares, parks and cemeteries, play this role. So does the contemporary café, which escapes the categories of traditional café, library, workplace, home and square to occupy an ambiguous space that belongs nowhere. Yes: escape language! Escaping language is the heart of Dada. Opening chaosmos through chaos, and smashing the grid, Euclideanism, petit-bourgeois myths and fantasies and simulacra, is in fact the centre of the project. Connections between ideas should not be received as text; a revolt must arise from some primal force that exists beneath them. So LLMs and AI should rightly be distrusted: an LLM is even more codified than language, operating even more within the Symbolic, and this must be broken. May 1968: under the paving stones, the beach! Dada! Dada! Destroy everything, expose the Real. For each feature of the city, it is not enough to select a "building" and play it; what matters is what the building is, its functional and formal parameters. Is it an apartment, and if so, how old is it? Is it a motel? Is it a building with a Starbucks on the ground floor? Is it a shopping mall or a corner shop? The natural mixing of these diverse characteristics matters most. Chaotic colours, a chaotic feeling: chaosmos, confused yet ordered. The key is tailoring the confusion so that it can be received well. The American sociologist Ray Oldenburg argued for a "third place", neither home nor work, and this too functions as a kind of chaotic space. The third place opens a gap between zoning and systems of order, creating small possibilities for relaxing and releasing excessive order, very much like the role of objet a in psychoanalysis. Such spaces are free from conventional functional distinctions, places with blurred boundaries that transcend even the division between private and public and, beyond taboo and order, play the role of a Dionysian festival. Appropriate, flexible chaos in the city releases its rigidity; in spatial structure the rhizome plays the role of chaos against rigid order, making room to breathe within a repressive system of order. CHAOSMOS = CHAOS (death drive, release) + COSMOS (life drive, contraction). Further from the book: mind, organism, society, economy, city, technology and machine are ways of organising and arranging chaosmos. The book attempts a kind of systemics, a systemics of flows and chaosmos. City, mind and economy share one structure; all of them are in fact connected, because they are structures made by infinite chaos and finite cosmos, structures that go beyond the classical boundary between living beings and machines. This is the point of entanglement. Banpo-Xism must be opposed, along with the cycles and pendulum motion of cram school and school, of work and rest. Where does entropy come from? Where does information come from? Information comes from heterogeneity, from a kind of harmony. Criticality, catastrophe theory, power laws, exponential growth; discontinuity and contingency. This discontinuity and contingency are actualised by interaction. Like the vending machine idea: natural, very natural. Where do such ideas come from? A natural spilling out: vending machines! Repetition, repetition compulsion? Perverse repetitions, repetitions of features? Where does the artist's own smell come from? Painting a yellow scream. Instruments, orchestras, repetitions: Warhol, Gursky, Jacques Tati, Marclay. The moment of splitting: urban surrealism, urban Dadaism, the moment the Real surges up and bursts out. The repressed, the beach beneath the paving stones. Momentary collapses and splits. Playing the city means not playing the Symbolic but revealing the Real: playing chaos, singing chaos, Also sprach Zarathustra. Brecht's Verfremdungseffekt. Rising retaining walls, a kind of deviation. The rejection of Banpo-Xism, of petit-bourgeoisism, of Daechi-dong (Seoul's cram-school district). The rejection of the harmonious family, the happy family, modernism, rules and discipline. The return of Gotham, of darkness, of confusion, of the grotesque, of genius. A critique of the petit bourgeois: Gerhard Richter? A quoted passage on Richter: these stories reveal the family as a self-destructive facade, and the longing for petit-bourgeois happiness as a deceptive hope; the tragedy is that in almost every case the perpetrator is a family member. Richter seems not to have trusted the family as a safe nest or a place of harmonious happiness for a couple and their children; rather, through family photographs he stages the deceptive image of an intact middle class, referring ambiguously to the tragic background of a motif or relying on the false epics that advertising professionally fabricates. His paintings draw their tension from the dissonance between tragic, imperfect everyday reality and the hopeful utopia of personal happiness. Having experienced little family stability as a child, Richter later satirised this philistine petit-bourgeois world and exposed its illusions, while also putting petit-bourgeois virtues to use in his work. The sociologist Berthold Franke, assessing the petit-bourgeois phenomenon, defined the petit bourgeois as a person who takes the social average as a role model (glossed in the notes as Banpo-Xism): "someone who seeks normality, in fact an endangered normality, the very embodiment of true ordinariness". Richter put it with exaggeration in a 1966 text: "I want to be like other people, to think what other people think, and anyway to act like them." Disgust at every average, every pretence, every customer-service agent, every bourgeois, every Banpo Xi. New confusion, confusion over order: feeling the city through irregular interaction instead of order. Urban Dadaism. 17 July 2025 Texts to write: individualism (competitive individualism) and reductionism; the dead graph, G(V, E) with no live edge because all vertices are equal. Waves: identical waves, and Fourier waves. The return of the Real: how, within the Symbolic, a natural disaster (torrential rain) delays the trains that otherwise run back and forth like a pendulum every day; how one comes face to face with nature, the Real; and how the Symbolic is tied to continuous, periodic, repetitive motion (departing at the same time every day, a 24-hour periodicity, identical waves). The Symbolic is a mixture of order and discipline (CCTV, rules, periodic waves) and petit-bourgeois fantasy (family, happiness, Banpo-Xism, the desire to own). A thermodynamic interpretation of the city? A bricolage of maps? Phase transition and self-organisation? A harmony: the Real, punctum, some musical force rising, freed, from the swamp of the Symbolic. Beyond all pretence, all flatness, all Euclidean-Cartesian order, all rational command: destruction, the force of the irrational, the non-Euclidean. Strategy: emphasise irrationality through the repetition of rational objects (a kind of repetition compulsion, in the manner of Warhol and Gursky). Rational objects: house, land and construction prices (Hans Haacke and his Manhattan real-estate work), Banpo-Xism, the Dream of Squares (a Euclidean dream), advertising (the petit-bourgeois ideal, the selling of happiness), vending machines. Competitive individualism, an individual-collectivism, is a reductive individualism: the more people compete, the more identical they become. Achieving irrationality through the repetition of rational objects: the things mistaken for rational are competitive individualism, neoliberalism, materialism, immediate and calculated optimisation (local optimisation produces greater inefficiency), Banpo-Xism, the rules of Gangnam. So the formula is: the repetition (through interaction; Warhol's repetition compulsion; the massness of contemporary society, as in Gursky) of reductionism (Banpo-Xism and Gangnam, optimisation and rationalism, asset prices, quantification) yields irrationality (the whole is not the sum of its parts; inter-node relationships; the edge itself is Yeongdeungpo), emphasised as punctum. From the Symbolic to the return of the Real. The city as rules and discipline (Banpo-Xism). Competitive individualism with only one direction (the university entrance exam), space for the petit bourgeois. Each node is independent, in a competitive relation, yet actually identical to the others, homogenised through competition. There are no edges between nodes, or they form only for the spread of trends, for pretentious directions. Anonymity, slaves of the system, colourless and odourless, a single objective function. The grid, flatness, the Dream of Squares, 2D. House prices, land contracts, cram schools, bourgeois happiness, all controlled through apartments and the Symbolic control structure of CCTV. Then, punctum through interaction: from a mere collection of nodes to nodes and edges. Emergence: each with its own rhythm, each switching itself on and off, all with different periodicities; each living at its own speed and finding its own wave. And from this, emergence arises. The anti-grid (a city is not a tree, a semi-lattice), the Imaginary and the Real, 3D, rising, uplift, chaotic harmony (chaosmos). Rules and the Imaginary: in competition and individualism only nodes exist, with no inter-node relationships, no edges. Every node follows the same rule: the part equals the whole, and the whole equals the sum of its parts. The same categorical imperative, "happy machines", the rhythm of happy machine sounds in which all waves coincide. From here comes the possibility of liberation: liberation of the square, liberation from Symbolic rules, from petit-bourgeois "happiness", from Banpo-Xism. The recovery of smell, of colourfulness, of irregularity. Each node now begins to play its own, different rhythm: the return of colourfulness. f1 = 300 Hz is not f2 = 420 Hz: echoes, beats, the diversification of Fourier waves. Colourfulness naturally forms an agent-based, complex system; now all agents differ. Visualising the rules and the initial state: squares. Rules, the Symbolic, petit-bourgeois commands (surveillance and happiness). Identical house prices, identical CCTV, identical apartments, identical and periodic traffic flows (the Hannam Ogeori junction). The identical "symptoms" of the city: the machine, the city-machine, happy machines, enforced happiness. Then the eruption of the Real, via interaction: at first it affects only one local area or intersection, later multiple areas, forming emergence between intersections. Diversification through playing, the return of the Real through playing: diversifying and playing (λ, T, φ). Agent-based modelling and complexity science: all agents have different speeds and different rhythms, a differential system. Yang Jung-uk's Fatigue Always Comes with Dreams: colourful rhythms, each agent living by its own periodicity, which produces distinctive rhythms at the level of the system. From machine to nature: from the same T and the same rhythm to each one's own autonomous, wave-like flow. 18 July 2025 The individual within the Symbolic, like a machine, competes within an identical wave: ψ = A sin(kx − ωt + φ) = f(A, λ, T, φ). For the Symbolic order and the petit bourgeois, λ, T and φ are all identical, and people compete only over A: university entrance, luxury bags (the consumption of signs), apartment location (Banpo-Xism). Hence individual = collective trait, individual = machine, individual = c × individual. The sum of ψ = C × ψ. The property of the whole equals the property of the part: reductionism holds; the machine, happy machines. But if the values of λ, T and φ change: Fourier! A symphony! Beats! Each agent acts differently, and the sum of ψ is no longer ψ. Understanding the parts does not mean understanding the whole; the whole's properties are not the sum of the parts' properties. A complex system and emergence arise: all agents become different from one another, and an agent-based model is generated. A metaphor from graph theory. Before: every node is the same, with no difference between nodes and no edges between them (a side effect of competition and reductionism); or, in another reading, edges exist superficially, only at the level of pretence and the spread of trends. After: all nodes differ, with different potentials and properties; the differences between nodes, like a potential difference, generate edges and emergence, and a graph G(V, E) is formed. Emphasising irrationality through the repetition of rational objects thus becomes: the interactive transformation of the rational objects (λ, T, φ) into (λ', T', φ') produces complexity and emergence. Agent-based ideas and figures: flow, traffic flow, though the artwork's expression is not meant to become traffic flow explicitly. The earlier Symbolic: squares, grids, rules; CCTV, real-estate transactions, the administrative map of Yeongdeungpo district, cadastral real-estate maps, text (the Symbolic), petit-bourgeois representation and manufactured happiness, colourlessness (the cubicles of Jacques Tati's PlayTime). Then punctum: interaction between clusters, cubicles and intersections. A tipping point via interaction; Christopher Alexander's semi-lattice. Why waves as the metaphor? The sum of waves, the Fourier transform (from Sparks of Genius: sums of simple patterns and waves make complex systems, the whole differs from its parts, linked also to agent-based modelling); thermodynamic, physical and quantum metaphors; chaosmos; periodicity T; and musicality, since moving waves through instruments and instrumental interaction feels natural. 20 July 2025 A chatbot conversation (Gemini) was consulted. Working titles noted: "Competition leads to Homogenisation"; "Against Petit Bourgeois - Early Thoughts"; "The return of the real - city, simulacres, punctum". Revealing how each agent, each individual, lives in the city? Playing the city as revealing and drawing how individuals live within urban structure? Each individual works towards a particular objective, optimising, but when all those optimisations and trajectories are gathered together, they become a kind of comedy: the sum of optimisations leads to an emergent, complex system that is not necessarily optimal (the cars crossing Hannam Bridge). Materials for achieving irrationality through the repetition of rational objects. Route optimisation and navigation: many navigation routes superimposed on one screen, gradually tangling over time into an unreadable mass of lines, visualising the irony that rational attempts to find the optimal route together create a more complex and inefficient situation. House prices, real-estate registry certificates, contracts and building registers. Data walls of real-estate prices, stock quotes and traffic volumes. The education system. Transit card data and the transfer system (the familiar spoken "transfer" announcement). CCTV screens, mechanisms of control. Receipts, delivery app and kiosk order screens. QR codes spawning numerous derivative websites: generated QR codes which, when scanned, lead on to further parts of the performance. An example navigation map: at first there is nothing, almost only a grid. But as playing continues, tapping buildings, lines between buildings appear, and as these lines keep multiplying, the map of Yeongdeungpo is eventually drawn. A route API would load several kinds of data at once, such as public transport and car routes. Data walls of real-estate prices, stock quotes, traffic volumes (?): the stock ticker wall of the exchange (Yeouido); the Solari departure boards of airports and railway stations (Yeongdeungpo station; Das Gerede; Gursky's Frankfurt); the control room (traffic control centre, disaster and safety situation room). Clicking or touching a specific intersection reflects data on the economic activity occurring there on a data wall. A Starbucks: receipts, coffee purchases. An apartment: housing transactions and similar economic activity appearing on the surrounding screens. Individually each is rational, but as they multiply and pile up they form a single visual emergence. Playing means adjusting parameters; how should that adjustment work? The direction is something like a symphony of data, a city-data symphony. The city as a vast hyperobject, with economic activity happening there every day, and emergence within it. The city is beautiful in itself: the semi-lattice, ever-flowing city (Yeongdeungpo) is beautiful in itself. The downtown is beautiful, the area around Samseong station is beautiful, but Banpo, Dongtan and Ilsan are not. This Manhattan-like quality: not vaguely criticising economic activity but sublimating it. Beautiful activities! Beautiful randomness! Beautiful emergence! Look: you carry on rational activities every day, yet do they not finally make one huge irrationality, one huge semi-lattice, one huge rhizome? Huge numbers of "Baemin order!" notifications (from Baedal Minjok, Korea's dominant food-delivery app). A CCTV-grid aesthetic: CCTV, a huge traffic control centre, a disaster and safety situation room. The giant CCTV aesthetic of the Joker scene. Node-node relationships, applying the same logic as Collective Opinion: create edges between all nodes recently selected in interactions at other intersections and the node currently selected at the current intersection. The edge is not just a visual edge; it explores what relationship, what semantic relationship, could form along each edge between that node and each other node. For example, a fried-chicken shop and housing: a Baemin order. An office building and a Starbucks: ? A school and housing: ? Third places? And of course a shortest-route navigation API is included to show the navigation route. A symphony of data. 24 July 2025 Creating urban structure: generating an emergent urban structure through playing the city on the phone? First, a study of harmony and of mobile interaction. How should interaction be viewed instrumentally? There are two main directions: harmony, and the electronic instrument. From the perspective of harmony: when a user plays a photorealistic 3D map on their phone like piano keys, varied effects appear across the surrounding devices. The first-order effect is the node's own correspondence: pressing an apartment building brings up an apartment, a Starbucks building brings up Starbucks, an office building an office (or some similar immediate, single-node semantic response); experientially, it provides an immediate audiovisual effect. The second-order effect is the creation of edges, of connections, between the current node and previous nodes. The typical example is showing routes: shortest paths between the current node and all the other selected nodes, so that urban structure, a graph tissue, gradually forms, both visually and conceptually or systemically. But these effects have a limit: they treat each interaction only as a discrete node click. For the user, interaction is one continuous act; they might press different nodes simultaneously (a chord), or press different nodes in different ways (staccato, legato), and a successful instrumental interaction should reflect this. Especially if the current finger-skating interaction on the map is influenced by the piano, more study of harmony (or melody and rhythm) is needed. How can instrumental interaction on the map go beyond combinations of discrete, quantised node adjustments to become one continuous act? And how, in response, do the surrounding output screens react and generate emergent behaviour? On sustaining emergence: interaction creates a network, a tissue, a complex system. How, then, does the system stay alive when there is no further interaction? How does it remain alive and keep evolving? From the perspective of the electronic instrument: the Reactable tabletop DJ instrument, Ableton's Session View, or a Launchpad. Once an interaction is made, it repeats according to a particular BPM and cycle or loop. How does this differ from the harmonic, piano-like approach, and which suits the work better? Additionally, a wave perspective: referring to the earlier description of waves, how should it be built? Second, a study of repetition of objects: how can Banpo-Xism be made to collapse step by step? Do not strain to find objects to repeat; repeat what is naturally around, as with the vending machines. Perhaps start from Yeongdeungpo's catchphrases: "Happy Yeongdeungpo", "People-centred Yeongdeungpo", "Sights of our neighbourhood", "Getting to know our neighbourhood". Or from happy Banpo-Xism websites about transactions, market prices, education and living zones (how well the Gangnam way of life, apartment living plus waterfront plus shopping mall plus education, is provided). Begin with such catchphrases, happy websites and petit-bourgeois creeds, and repeat them, almost shamelessly. On and through this repetition, punctum appears. Existing devices and displays are filled with their usual content, but it is as if a screw had come loose somewhere (or there were too many screws: a mad repetition). And within this mad repetition, a repetitive feedback loop, a feedback-reinforcement interaction (on top of the mobile map interaction)? A working website, a junk site, junk happiness, designed madly and repetitively. Two kinds of interaction act on it: interaction on the website itself (symbolising limited interaction within the semiotic and Symbolic order), and instrumental interaction on the phone (the return of the Real, the return of punctum, from outside the Symbolic). Third, graphs and emergence: a phase transition occurs when E/V > 0.5 (the edge of chaos). How is interaction drawn graphically, structurally? Take intersections I1, I2, I3 and so on; at each intersection I_j, a set of clicked buildings B_j1, B_j2 and so on; and the target building B_ti at the current target intersection I_t. Connections are made between B_ti and the buildings of all other intersections: between the current node of the current target and the nodes previously selected at every other target. These connections are explicitly routes: shortest path, shortest public-transport route, shortest car route. As these routes accumulate, from nothing at first an urban structure, a city map, gradually appears. This is the more explicit kind of edge, based on map routes; forms with the same principle but a different surface (semantic relationships) are equally possible. Interaction should be shown intuitively as a graph. A question: within graphs organised this way, built from nodes and edges that "came into being" through interaction, how does further emergence occur? Fourth, multi-device: the devices must relate to one another, not through mere visual or structural correlation but through real feedback loops. The core of the design is being able to build complexity (chaosmos, the edge between order and chaos) from natural feedback loops and few rules. All the rules should be intuitive and immediately experienced rather than ambiguous, while the complexity they produce should be astonishing. 28 July 2025 On grids: a revolt against all grid-ness and all simulacra. 2D and 3D space; density, flexibility, relation, network, heterogeneity. Interaction, then wave-ness or a wave function, then output format. Multi-device: different surface expressions of the same relational or topological structure, or surface expressions of parts of a closely connected relational structure (a feedback loop). This is why the first-order and second-order effects seem separate but are in fact closely linked. In contrast, beneath Banpo-Xism and the Dream of Squares there is no rhizomatic relation or structure; the individual grid cell is simply the property of the node itself. A quoted passage from Jang Yong-soon's book: architects come to realise that the problem of circulation is closely tied to architecture, and that the real problem of the city arises not from the composition of the forms of objects but from systems, organisation, networks and infrastructure. They learn that the working of the city depends more on the system of circulation infrastructure and the quality of public space than on the quality of the buildings themselves. In this situation architecture becomes a problem not of objects but of relations, and the idea arises naturally that the character of objects is determined by relations and form is determined by structure. This awareness of structure and relation gradually seeps into architecture. Diagrams and connectivity, and the dynamics and arrows beneath them. A new understanding of the map, drawing maps anew, drawing maps relationally: psychogeography. Map and city: covering the city with the map? Reconfiguring map and city. Resetting topological structures and relations? By altering topological structure, a space grounded in collage-like, psychogeographic, bricolage-like and distorted topological relations (a 3D space, but not a "representational" one) is born out of the traditional city, the 2D map and 3D modelling that "represents" reality. The principle of cartography (Deleuze, via Jang Yong-soon): the map has no copy-original relation; it transforms itself. This principle connects to the diagram in Foucault and Deleuze. The diagram, a space of variation constantly changed and generated, is precisely the map, which can be "torn, reversed and montaged". The rhizome has the character of map, diagram and abstract machine at once; while the tree keeps the copy-original relation of representing an original, the rhizome can be endlessly transformed and varied. Perhaps Deleuze drew this principle of cartography from The Naked City of the Situationist International; such a map exists not as a representation of the world but as an operation aimed at creation without an original. And from Deleuze and Guattari: if the map is opposed to the tracing, it is because it is wholly oriented towards experimentation in contact with the real. The map belongs to the rhizome. It is open, connectable in all its dimensions; it can be dismantled, reversed and constantly modified; it can be torn, reversed, adapted to any kind of montage, and drawn up by an individual, a group or a social formation. It can be drawn on a wall, conceived as a work of art, or constructed as a political action or a meditation. Designing the interaction: simple is best. Two levels. The currently selected: immediate sound effects, immediate change. The selected: the composition and organisation of urban structure, the groundwork of a mesh in which emergence can occur. Formed first immediately by playing the instrument, and then sustained as ongoing emergence. 29 July 2025 Interaction like the Pen-IG video: with only a little playing, a little drawing, wonder must be induced, with emergence forming immediately. Each channel may tell a different story according to its perspective. In the 3D cityscape, where one touches and what one plays can produce entirely different results: some outputs centre on location, some screens on referents. Complex yet simple. Occam's razor. Building a large system from simple connections and dynamics. Can a complex system be created? One must not over-design the complex system itself; the focus should be on the naturally occurring flows and systems beneath it, the topological and structuralist structure of the city. An icon: topology, the iconic, a parameter? 30 July 2025 The structure of city and interaction: divide the whole of Yeongdeungpo into a grid, so that, for example, (3,4) corresponds to Yeouido. In the middle of the exhibition space, RFID tags are actually placed according to this grid structure; scanning the tag at (3,4) connects one to Yeouido. At first, waves of isomorphism; but as time passes, the waves all become different. Interacting with a neighbourhood means strolling through it, touching it. Interaction as madness: start slowly, then accelerate further (instrumental playfulness). Soundscape: sound is naturally wave-like, and its connection with instrumental interaction is no accident. Interaction, madness, typing. A focus on relational structure, on "relations" rather than objects (Schoenberg's twelve-tone method?). Identical grids, grids that were identical at first, yet 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 from 2D to 3D (3D overlaid on 2D). Each wakes from the Dream of Squares in its own way. Some grids break sooner, others later: the collapse of absoluteness, of rules, of the Symbolic. So the initial visuals offer an indirect critique of Banpo-Xism (the Gangnam way of life) through various representations, grids and Dreams of Squares: 2D real-estate maps, parametric interfaces (systems that constrict people), the grid-like structures of Banpo Xi. These are the interfaces, symbols and sign systems through which people, petit-bourgeois subjects within the Symbolic, understand the city in limited, framed ways; the image-systems that ordinary people know and encounter as "the city", but which are in fact the Symbolic order, castrated, Procrustean images. Within them the individual is castrated, forced to give up their value (their wave) and fit the frame of the system. The work starts from elements commonly seen in such "Gangnam-style cities" and new towns. How do they gradually collapse through interaction? Two interaction channels. Mobile interaction is the primary interaction: instrumental, multi-user, smashing the Dream of Squares. Tablet interaction is the secondary interaction: endlessly circulating, reinterpreting and reconstructing the topological and relational structure of what has been reestablished or dismantled. 31 July 2025 On sorting algorithms: a structure, a given structure, and its rearrangement and redistribution. A sorting algorithm adjusts not the "visible" structure but the topological, relational, "virtual" structure beneath it. The city that results from adjusting this virtual structure, a city adjusted topologically and relationally, is closer to the city we actually live in and can sense than the castrated city, the city of the Euclidean 2D map, the tree-city, Banpo Xi. An aesthetic of topological, automatic rearrangement. Good interaction is instrumental. It starts from a blank screen with only a grid. As visitors interact with their fingers, the urban structures that had been castrated and abstracted begin to come alive and move. In the output, what was simply a 2D map has some of its tiles begin to pop up into 3D, with some circulating, grid-based rhythm. A system that had worked well within its normal operating range collapses under accelerated, excessive interaction: the system's rules stay the same, but its operating range is exceeded. Emergent collapse, phase transition, the passing of a critical point: a new phase transition born not from "breaking the rules" but from "overloading the rules". The collapse of the Symbolic, the return of the Real. Especially the multi-user co-oscillation or co-resonance effect: resonance in Deleuze's sense, the resonance of waves, Fourier interference, folding. Quoted: for Deleuze, resonance arises not from a similarity that presupposes identity but as an effect of differences; it does not arise in subordination to a single idea, but is something that occurs after the fact between independent, heterogeneous terms. Intersections generated, systems superposed. An Instagram reference: four tornado warnings at once. Beauty, naturalness, the spontaneous, the networked. Audiovisual harmony: Collective Opinion, collective resonance. Redesigning the map, reconstructing it topologically, through strolling, instrumental interaction: a psychogeographic rearrangement of the "map" (the 2D, representational map). From the 2D real-estate map to a volumetric 3D map; from physical adjacency to semantic adjacency; sorting algorithms. Proving, rather, the diversity of the city, in which distant things and distant objects are entangled. Differences of perspective: semantics too can be reinterpreted from many different viewpoints, and everything can be redesigned by physical height, year of construction, function, relation to surroundings, the length of a building's name (NLP-like similarity), or the presence of a Starbucks. A uniform system, a system that had been running, a parametric interface, overloaded through an overload of interaction: punctum! A Warhol-like, Gursky-like drive to repeat. --- 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.