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Jeanyoon Choi (b.1999) is a Computational Artist researching in interconnectivity and complexity through Multi-Device Web Artworks.

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Banpo-Xism Artist Notes: August 2025

2025-08-21

1 August 2025

The starting proposition is to redesign the Banpo-Xist, grid-like city in topological, relational, experiential and psychogeographic form, through an interaction that plays the city like an instrument and walks it like a flâneur.

Topological rearrangement moves from the 2D map, a simulacral and Procrustean map, towards a 3D map, and from physical adjacency to semantic adjacency. Could a single scene become an emergent network, and how would such a network be made? Interaction supplies the raw material; on that material, the system operates by itself.

There is an existing system already at work: the Matrix, Banpo-Xism, the order of signs. A moderate amount of interaction is good for such a system. But when interaction exceeds what the system was designed to handle, and when that interaction arrives as play, as the playing of an instrument, the rules become overloaded. The original system breaks down and a phase transition appears. Fast-forwarding a video a hundred times is one example: a kind of hacking takes place along a spatio-temporal dimension.

The topological transformation turns rules that were taken for granted at the level of reality into something reinterpreted at a non-essential, sensory and virtual level: resonance and folding. It is a change of viewpoint away from simple representation, from what is grounded in reality, from the Euclidean-Cartesian and the "clear and distinct". It implies a different evaluation. Psychogeography here means evaluation made from the individual's interaction, from the subject's point of view. Relations are endlessly regenerated and destroyed.

Because the reconstruction is about maps, networks and topological connection, lines matter: transport, flow.

For multi-user interaction, the idea is a physical and network simulation. At first the played city fragments stay as they are, standing still. With two or more people interacting, the fragments acquire stronger cohesion, something like gravitation or electromagnetic force. One person is a single node; two or more people produce n nodes and every edge between them, nC2 relations. Following these forces, these relations and this set of topological lines, the whole space is distorted and restructured: psychogeography, and a Deleuzian fold.

On the mobile phone, the interaction begins with a blank Cartesian grid. Tapping a position materialises a building or a piece of urban fabric as a wireframe; playing it again turns it into a 3D model, a digital twin, moving from the abstract to the concrete.

The two-dimensional city is augmented and reinterpreted in three dimensions through tension, relations and topological operations, with an Inception-like inspiration of folds and pleats. The Situationist International's The Naked City stayed in 2D; the aim here is to make it 3D.

The overall movement is from the established understanding of the city (Euclidean grid, tree, disentanglement, top-down, Xism), through interaction (the city flâneur, the instrument), to a topological and relational reconstruction (chaosmos, rhizome, entanglement, bottom-up agent-based modelling, semi-lattice).

The Centre Pompidou, by Richard Rogers and his collaborators, put all its relational terms on the outside, and so it can be refitted. In the same way, the work should reinterpret, play and act on not the city's appearance but the relational terms beneath it: topological relations, symbolic water supply and drainage, transport networks, every kind of network. Playing the city does not mean letting people click individual buildings of a 3D model one by one. To play the city is to awaken its underlying relational networks, transport above all, its topological structure and its virtuality, and through that to look at the city again. All the relational forces, even the city's excrement, are placed outside.

The visitor comes to play and stroll the city at once. The city becomes, for instance, a gigantic piano keyboard, and this playing begins to recompute and reconstruct the relations between urban elements topologically, beyond the composition of the city as we knew and perceived it. This is a newly composed dynamics: a visualisation, experience, affirmation and re-evaluation of the forces, relations, differentials, virtualities, excretions and networks that lie behind the surface appearance called "the city".

6 August 2025

Superimposition and topological structures: the structures beneath what is visible. The aim is a new geometry, a topological structure of urban space, drawing new 2D and 3D maps, a new topology. This is a chaosmos, a world made of flows and intensities. The city-field is not a world of forms but one structured by countless lines of becoming, singularities and potentials. What could best show this potential? Structure, relations, topology, diagrams, the virtual dimension.

One image is a Möbius strip; another is overlapping by skewering, like Busan fish cakes on a stick, a city structure built like Busan eomuk. Other experiments include urban expansion and contraction, city collage, topological collage and semantic collage, collage along variables other than height. Various topological operations were already tried in the earlier work The Chronology of Civilisation.

In the city's topology, the subway, roads and buses underneath play a special and even very attractive role as circuits and metabolism. References noted here are MTDBRI and Kakao's high-precision subway map.

Topological relations can be transformed and interpreted in many ways: similarity and lineage by interaction, by physical specification, by history and period, by character, trade or architectural style, by development and transport network. Grouping all the Starbucks together, grouping all the cram schools together: making and eating Busan fish cakes. Happiness, too: as happiness is tapped more and more.

The goal is emergent, spontaneous, continuously moving urban fabric. How can it be made? By generating collaged networks? And how can a natural rhythm be drawn out?

7 August 2025

A strategy for destructuring: "system overload".

The rules of repetition dissolve into the interaction, gradually mixing and destructuring until the original grid is nowhere to be seen. This destructuring does not happen because the rules are broken. On the contrary, it is an error produced by following the rules too well, by carrying out the rule and the command without end. System overload challenges the myth of algorithmic objectivity. It is an artistic repetition aimed at the reductionism of single-metric governance, showing the ultimate poverty and meaninglessness of a one-dimensional pursuit of happiness. A kind of phase transition occurs.

There is a working system, Banpo-Xism. Intermittent, ordinary, everyday interaction keeps it running. But when an enormous amount of interaction arrives, beyond a certain limit, the system malfunctions and a phase transition happens. The former categorical imperatives of the system (Banpo-Xism; compete; stay within the lines; fight over the square; reductionist ideology) collapse and are destroyed, through an entirely different topological transition, and an emergent system takes their place.

The individualistic system that had been running, with its slaves, gives way, through overflowing and instrumental interaction, to the formation of an organism: Dionysian, one vast network, self-generating, self-producing, self-performing its topological relations, self-multiplying. It is an invitation to the true city and true dynamics, where city fragments keep moving, being generated and emerging. Too much is as bad as too little, and that is exactly the method: hacking the system by overloading it.

The elephant and the blind men: the urban system is vast, a virtuality, a system behind the visible. Each output screen or scene captures only part of it, like the blind men touching the elephant.

With zero people, the square stays as it is, trapped in the rule itself. With one person, playing begins and departure is signalled, but slowly. With two people, a network forms and destruction spreads in all directions: the nC2 revolution, the onset of a phase transition. A fluid city, a network, the discovery of infrastructure. Shifts in terrain and in perception that are not merely geometric or formal but topological, relational and essential.

The city is an order castrated inside a square, a stuffed and mounted order, a Procrustean bed, Banpo-Xism. Yet beneath this frame lies the force of the real, the power of the city as humanity's greatest invention (chaosmos), with its topological and relational structure and its revolutionary potential. The project is to rediscover the infinite potential found there. Beneath the paving stones, the beach.

The city has been an abstracted, repressed combination of signs, trapped under the logic of optimisation and of minimal marginal difference: Banpo-Xism, real estate, routes, school districts. The city was perceived not by smell or substance but by numbers and squares (Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation). Through interaction, these signs collapse; the view zooms out. The city structure becomes substantial and strikes back: the counterattack of the beach that had been flattened, castrated and turned into Xi. This zoom-out is not a camera move but a conceptual one, an essential change in which the return of the real is overlaid on the existing urban structure. Zooming out, the elephant and the blind men again: from the castrated city of real estate, optimisation, flatness and squares (the state of the blind men) to the elephant itself, reinterpreting the topological, relational, wave-like and resonant aspects of the city underneath.

Parametric interface: the everyday interface is a repressed structure, with a system hidden beneath it. Transforming signs and hacking the structure that connects them caricatures this repressed structure. Every modern system has a fixed available and used capacity, and the moment it is exceeded, it malfunctions; through that malfunction, one gets out of the box. How can running or circulating the system excessively lead to a zoom-out punctum? Through instrumental interaction: playing the city, and showing the abstracted, castrated city as a concrete, three-dimensional object.

On the "normal": the normal, everyday flows are in fact abnormal, forcibly covering the real with the symbolic order. Yet even these flows cannot avoid the return of the real, which arrives through repetition compulsion. Rather than rebelling against the flow and the rules, one follows them, and follows them too well, so well that the flow overflows, the system is overloaded and finally collapses: the symbolic order falls and the real returns.

These flows are traffic, capital (real estate, finance), and the capitalisation, signification and quantification of objects. Traffic lights are the archetype of the symbolic order, the representation of rules; a flow of the real arises that escapes the abstract frame of signs. Other candidates are CCTV and control-room aesthetics, the systems by which the symbolic order controls the city and the real; escalators and elevators; junk spaces.

Target audience: families with young children, and middle and high school students. A possible interaction is lifting the ground, as in Heatherwick's Azabudai Hills.

The concept of the city-field: an underlying field or force of the city, like an electromagnetic field. A single small stimulus produces little response, but when several stimuli arrive at once, interconnections form and emergence occurs: a network. Related keywords are madness, collage, Dada text-collage, repetition compulsion, exceeding and amplifying, tearing, punctum.

The city-score: five places, treated not as places as they are or as 3D models but as something like a score. Unlike a score predefined for the performer, it keeps evolving through feedback loops in the structure of the city-field. Playing the city-score produces distortions across the whole city-field, bringing waves and flows of interaction into a gridded, motionless field. It is not a matter of a simple touch that reveals what sits on top. These scores call up wave-like behaviour in the middle of the grid and actualise the latent waves. A control room for the existing, everyday distribution structure: the symbolic order and periodicity show that what was taken as "normal" was in fact abnormal. This is an attack by the city-field and its waves, an indictment of the abnormal, the return of the real.

The city-field is ultimately a network: the subway map, the virtual, the infrastructure, a diagram of relations from point A to point B. The urban sensations we perceive are already controlled and castrated. Much of modern life is repressed by the city's order and symbolic structure: commuting and traffic jams, the absence of time, leisure and freedom, real estate and house prices. Many contemporary problems are urban problems. The work should expose this repressive structure as temporary, simulacral and symbolic, and imagine a return of the real beyond it.

The city-field is a virtual structure. To distort it, give it ten or a hundred times its mass in gravitational pull, transforming the hierarchies, dynamics and topological relations among urban components: folding, distortion, network, exaggeration. Through exaggerated flow, as in Warhol and Gursky, who amplify and repeat the object, the excess of flow becomes an eruption of the real. A natural disaster, by contrast, halts everything and destroys all that is artificial. The method is to keep the system's rules and carry them out exactly, but a hundred times over: an abnormality of scale, an excessive flow, an excessive outpouring of the real.

Happiness, hope, the future city: amplify these. Changing the base changes the superstructure. The interaction input is bricolage.

8 August 2025

Hopeful! Happy! Futuristic! The idea is to exaggerate this happy flow. Hope, happiness and the future are slogans, and the slogans are to be exaggerated. Does anyone dislike hope, happiness or the future? No, but exaggerate the flow and they become disagreeable, burdensome. It is a critique of the middle class, the bourgeoisie: HHF, too much happiness, too much hope, too much future.

What is there to say? Not a message so much as blind repetition, pushing by sheer quantity, precisely because happiness, hope and the future are all good words. Repeat them: happiness, hope, future. Because to be happy, to satisfy infinite desire, prices must go higher, and the roads must be more congested, terribly so. References: Bruce Nauman, Robert Indiana. More and more, happier, more futuristic, more hopeful. Happiness as a slogan, laws of happiness, a happiness circuit, an exchange law among happiness, future and hope.

For example: hope = 2 × happiness; future = happiness + hope. With happiness, hope and future as three elements, like A, C, G and T, different futures are built up. The point is to make something entirely rational in itself and therefore all the more absurd: looking critically, but in the most optimistic way. This is the most political approach, similar to Ai Weiwei's study of perspective.

The target is the illusion that happiness itself can be a goal: a critique of the purposiveness of happiness, of reductionist logic, of Cartesianism. Why speak of a calculus of happiness, hope and future through the language of the city? Because it is a critique of capitalism and also a critique of assets.

The law of pursuing happiness: accumulated happiness becomes hope, accumulated hope becomes the future, a kind of exchange law. It is national gaslighting, similar to the university entrance system: good exam, good grades, good school, good job, rich, happy. A reductive causality.

Two levels of critique follow. One targets happiness as an end, happiness as a slogan, reductionism, the petty bourgeoisie, Banpo-Xism. The other targets the wealth gap and social inequality: what happens if only one area keeps receiving interaction?

Another version: hope = 3 × happiness, future = 3 × hope, so future = 9 × happiness, and 13 × happiness = future + hope + happiness. Reductionist ideology: not 1984, but a capitalism that sells happiness.

If order can be established, order must also be exchangeable. Merely tapping a button may be too game-like. The interaction should escape the given rules of the algorithm, twist the semiotic structure of the given rules, and turn the game board over.

10 August 2025

A Gemini chatbot conversation was consulted and parts of its Korean response were pasted into the notes, describing the audience journey from naive participation to critical awareness, the strategy of overload rather than destruction, Banpo-Xism as shorthand for a materialist vision of the good life, tapping-for-happiness as a Baudrillardian simulacrum, and the work as a rebuttal of single-metric governance. These passages are not adopted here as authorial argument.

The artist's own response to it: all "happy" cities must be redeveloped into Banpo Xi, into apartments, into Daechi-dong, into One Bailey again. Corbusian. The same ideology of happiness, for "more" happiness.

A strong reference is ArtCity ("Everything is art!", PAN Amsterdam 2022, MVRDV with The Why Factory): topology, 3D structure, typology, redesign and animation. It is a very good 3D reference, especially technically and in its 3D staging.

12 August 2025

A language game: 3! = 6 orderings of hope, future and happiness (hope-future-happiness, hope-happiness-future, happiness-future-hope, happiness-hope-future, future-hope-happiness, future-happiness-hope).

Overturning the rules of calculation and exchange: refer to Tom Sachs; it is like a currency rate. Experiments in generating and dissolving rhythm must accompany this.

Cycles: the cyclicality of the city. A pop feeling, perhaps through a parametric interface? Take colour. How does that relate to Banpo-Xism? Something like The Grand Budapest Hotel combined with The Florida Project: intense colour, happiness stacked. The output dashboard is responsible for being kind to the visitor.

The question of the opening: minimalism, Kanye's Runaway? Option 1 is to prepare an inter-screen rhythm. Option 2 is to do it like Blob Opera: free, yet scalable. Blob Opera is the archetype of instrumental interaction, free while hiding its parameters. The whole 2D phone becomes a complete canvas, and whatever one chooses, there is little to lose.

Diagram: the diagram, the infrastructure, the virtual. The transformed infrastructure changes the superstructure correspondingly. At the visitor's fingertips, the city is collaged and made into a mosaic.

How to play with happiness, hope and future? The city, as a living organism, is moved and designed not by what is visible but by its infrastructure, topology, relations and forces. At present those are Banpo-Xism and the reductive logic of happiness; the aim is to overturn them.

The narrative structure to try is that of 2001: A Space Odyssey: exploration, then a moment of refusal against HAL, then discovery and the Übermensch. Idle state, first interaction, the moment of overturning, then topological playing in which the city is an instrument. The city is a vast symphony.

The intended experience: collaging, reconstructing and mosaicking the city at one's fingertips, an experience of conducting and generating; "the degree of internal diversity", "the arrangement of heterogeneity"; force, generation, transition, collision, movement; rearrangement, force, regeneration, transition as the projection of a will to power.

Contrasting programmes: a copy-paste apartment city against an organic city, a tidy city against an organic one. Many geometric programmes and stagings are possible, as in The Chronology: a Venn-diagram programme as a topological programme, a 50-degree rotation, segmentation, the same city fragments stretched, left still, then stretched again, a massage. How to play, animate and stage them? A study of scale, of surreal contrasts of scale.

Topology of cities: a one-stroke drawing, a "happiness circuit" made by linking happy points. Visualising urban fabric, emergence and networks: forces stretching, distortions produced by the city-field.

Surrealism: a surreally reconstructed urban landscape, urban fabric rebuilt through interaction, a Dada-influenced montage and collage of the city, re-sensing a 3D digital twin through participation rather than spectatorship. Repetition compulsion leads to system overload. The shape of the system, its infrastructure, is a diagram; the work changes, overturns and swaps positions within that structure.

17 August 2025

Gamifying the city? How to design the interaction: a happiness index rising in real time, house prices, land rents and other derived indices. Cycle, reduction, rule, law, deconstruction, destruction, destructuring and de-ruling.

A three-part structure: the stability of the number three. A cycle shifts everything one place along. Adjusting the system configuration destructures an ordered set of system rules. Signifier and signified are pushed one place along, as in Kim Beom's example of an iron, a kettle and a radio, each use value shifted by one.

HHL and Banpo-Xism as two loosely connected artworks? HHL is practical and interaction-driven; Banpo-Xism uses the same interactive language and adds a critical dimension. The same game and interaction are repeated twice, first experientially and then critically, once as tragedy (comedy), once as comedy (tragedy).

A version without referents would be just numbers, a simple collage, a 2048 metaphor: the happy but ignorant version, the Matrix's blue pill, with happiness, future and hope. A version with referents would explain happiness, hope and future, caricature the referents and expose the reductive structure (the return of the real): Banpo Xi, reductive rules.

The interaction as a 2048 metaphor: at first one plays 2048 to optimise an objective function; once proficient, it can be handled automatically and instrumentally; when the board grows (6 × 6), the game becomes endless, a combinatorial explosion. Similarly, urban organic fabric could be collaged freely: the grid, postcolonialism, the cut-up technique, Dada, découpé. Infinite combinations, perhaps an infinitely sustainable game form: changing and assembling city structures like Lego.

The rules of the game and navigation, a navigation aesthetic. How to control so much at once? Simple is best: one simple interaction language, using the map as material. Tapping like 2048? What interface? A rising happiness index: the simplest interaction, where answers tend to lie. What grammar: tap and increase, and what kind of tapping? On the mobile map there are two interactions, navigation and touching or tapping. That they cannot happen simultaneously is not a limitation but an advantage.

Infinite desire: the representation of infinite desire and the obsession with reductive desire (the happiness rule). The craving for higher scores and bigger numbers means gamification is central: the gamification of all life and every element of society is at the core. Play and addictiveness are extremely important. Infinite desire can lift things infinitely along the z-axis: the 2D map lifted into an ever-taller vertical city. An obsession with the infinite; infinite and finite.

Lifting the city, as with the lifted fragments of Azabudai Hills. HHL in a slightly altered, slightly buggy version: a slip, infinite transformation, infinite stacking. But as it becomes infinite, resources are used proportionally more while desire, governed by minimal marginal difference and comparison with others, always remains lacking. The city of desire: Rem Koolhaas, New York. The same interaction logic yields completely different results. Like Gentle Monster's Haus Nowhere, the upper, middle and lower floors could each be different, mixing heterogeneous objects together.

Is the flat city not equal to the vertical city? Can we build a utopia? Today's utopia is Banpo Xi: a reductive, boring vertical city in which everything faces the same normal vector.

Style: pop, pink, kitsch? A combination of images that can stage "happiness".

A long text, also dated 17 August, is organised in four parts: background, intention and narrative; the city-field, urban virtuality and topological operations; the overall multi-device structure of input, system and output and the map; interaction, experience and takeaway.

It describes a work that dismantles and overturns the superficial, commercial tendency of contemporary society to reduce complex human values such as happiness, hope and future to simple numbers, focusing on how such values shape the base of urban structure and on the symbiosis between a reductive pursuit of happiness, symbolised as Banpo-Xism, and the city. Rather than destroying the system directly, the narrative lets countless audience interactions make the system succeed excessively, so that it reveals its own emptiness and absurdity. This strategy of system overload is achieved paradoxically by filling the city with compulsive happiness.

The city is realised as a "City-Field" that includes relations, virtuality and topological structure beyond physical structures. Reconstructed in real time by the audience, the City-Field weaves together map data, 3D models and various cross-sections of the city. Instead of representing a fixed city, it reveals invisible infrastructure and virtuality, offering a chance to see the city as a new relational structure.

The multi-device web artwork has three areas: input, system and output. On the input screen, visitors produce happiness with their smartphones, manipulating the City-Field and changing the 3D model in real time. In the system area, a touch interface lets them modify or overturn the operating principles of the City-Field itself. All interactions appear in the output as fragmented cross-sections of the city, such as a real-estate price map, an apartment shopping-arcade directory and live public transport information, like blind men touching an elephant, forming a feedback loop in which visitors immediately see the effect of their actions on the simulated urban environment.

The experience is designed to move from naive participation to critical awareness. At first a simple tap raises the happiness index, which cascades into hope and future according to the system's satirical exchange law, demolishing the old city and building Banpo Xi. As collective participation over-accumulates happiness, the process becomes caricatured and absurd. Visitors can also intervene in the system interface to overturn the reductive laws of happiness directly, for example twisting the chain of signs so that a psychiatric hospital stands where Banpo Xi should be. This exposes how commodified values govern the city's underlying structure and produce empty results, while offering a chance to overturn that semiotic structure and prompting reflection on the reductive values of the contemporary city.

A short text headed 12 August exists in two versions. The first describes a multi-device web installation in which visitors, on a "City-Field" of Yeongdeungpo built as a 3D digital twin, produce happiness by touch and so transform the city's topology in real time. Happiness multiplies into hope and future according to simple rules and covers Yeongdeungpo's organic landscape, where finance, art and labour coexist, with the uniform desire of Banpo-Xism. Its true aspect, however, lies in opening the possibility of subversion rather than conformity: visitors twist the system's rules or cooperate to generate unpredictable chaos as subjects of Dionysian play. Sign play, over-participation and caricature expose the system's values as empty signs (simulacra) while pushing its rules to an extreme that induces overload. When the artificial symbolic order cracks and the city's latent form, the real, returns, the work asks what future city we hope for.

The second version describes an interactive web work of multiple devices (interactive stations, a system panel, controllers) completed by audience participation. On a 3D digital twin of Yeongdeungpo, visitors touch their phones as if playing a game, producing countless units of happiness that distort the topology of the virtual city on the surrounding screens. The happiness generates hope and future through reductive rules satirising the achievement society (happiness + happiness = hope). In the process, Yeongdeungpo's organic city-field is covered by the artificial structure of uniform desire symbolised as Banpo-Xism. But the more happiness is produced, the more the system reveals its value as an empty sign. Through over-participation, visitors join a "system overload" that paradoxically exposes the ideological emptiness inside, and through the return of the real reflect on the true meaning of the happiness, hope and future city we dream of.

18 August 2025

Mobile interface interaction: should "happiness" and "hope" appear explicitly as signs, referents and text, or in an abstracted way such as colour coding? There are many ways to represent happiness on a map: explicit or non-explicit, performative or non-performative. City tiles could be abstracted and shown as colour, with the happiness index rising as they accumulate.

Colour coding, applying colour: like compressing films into colour to summarise their running time. The city's colour is originally drab; on top of it, joy and colourfulness. Augmented colour applied to the city, like a film's running time compressed into colour, or like The Grand Budapest Hotel.

A systemic approach: the goal is a single urban-fabric system transformed by the city-field, a self-evolving system that runs and evolves on its own. Forms of agency. Structurally, the stability of three? What happens when several phones connect at once? Editing, tilting, urban fabric moving back and forth, self-evolving: can this be staged naturally? What is the city-field? What is replication? Why do pieces of urban fabric replicate? Why are city blocks topologically recomputed and restructured?

Initial staging, like Minecraft: in the beginning there was nothing; then a map forms and 3D models grow. The fun of staging is the fun of collage and of navigation: doing whatever one likes with the map, almost like playing Minecraft.

Problems to solve. The map-field: what is it, and how is it distorted? Elevate, repeat, replace: is there any other visual language? How can topological operations and the map-field be made intuitive? Its physical associations: distortion, relativity, gravitation, network? Is there a most natural, most physical representation? When building such a system, avoid too many assumptions and finish it as cleanly as possible: a minimum combination of rules induces emergent behaviour, a principle of complexity science. Also the problems of staging and of narrative.

The reductionist rules: what is the interaction scale of happiness? Happiness × 3 = hope, hope × 3 = future? How naturally and intuitively will visitors accept such rules? Is there a more intuitive referent? There is a trade-off between staging and system.

Urban fabric and megastructures: the intended city collage and city-field should be researched in an architectural and urban context: Kenzo Tange's plan for Tokyo, Rem Koolhaas, Azabudai Hills. The modularity of urban fabric?

19 August 2025

Three kinds of experiment are needed: visual, systemic, and interactive or experiential. They meet a theoretical axis running between the critical, narrative and semantic side and the urban, architectural and complex-systems side.

20 August 2025

collage/5: an experiment like Superstudio, collaging a strange fabric into the middle of urban fabric (Verfremdungseffekt). Visual experiments should simply tear, taste and enjoy, without logic: Dada itself, just collage, tearing, pasting and cutting, without rationale, the cut-up technique. Contrast artificial three.js meshes with natural urban fabric, or display natural landscape on artificial city fragments by changing mesh textures (Superstudio). References: Superstudio, Archigram. Tear, taste and enjoy the fragments.

Interaction: the same interaction is repeated twice, once as comedy and once as tragedy. How to design an addictive interaction? Blob Opera? Lifting the city, as in Heatherwick's Azabudai Hills? Semantically it adjusts the city-field; visually and practically it is a 3D form. The ordinary 2D map plane is lifted, and this elevation ultimately means happiness. How to connect it to the moment Banpo Xi arrives on that spot? The lifting interaction must be playable naturally, like an instrument (Blob Opera, Azabudai Hills).

Expansion of dimension. 2D is the flat map. 3D is elevation, vertical and linear development: one identical reductionist goal, one identical normal vector, competition for sameness, zero-sum, the rich getting richer and the poor poorer. 4D is topological development: twisting and folding, the Busan fish-cake skewer, the Klein bottle, folding in a Deleuzian sense. The normal vectors all point in different directions, everything heaves, and this is the beginning of true collage. Parameters: elevation, scale, stacking, normal vector, colour coding.

Is there a physical law that can explain this theory and interaction of the city-field? In systems terms: self-organisation, emergence, phase transition, system overload. How will quantitative overload produce an evolution from three to four dimensions? A Deleuzian sequence: difference, intensity, the virtual, differenciator, quality and quantity, the actual; indeterminacy, determinability, qualifiability, quantifiability. What feedback loop can be designed? Catastrophe theory: encountering a critical point, system overload, from 3D to 4D.

Staging: MVRDV's Datascape, 3D art. Transition as animation (The Chronology), collage, topological rearrangement. The aesthetics of sorting algorithms: sorting as topological rearrangement, the aesthetic of the rearranging animation itself, constantly evolving changes of position, as in MVRDV's Datascape.

What, then, is a change of position? A swap between signs, sign play within the structure of three: Banpo Xi, cram school, psychiatric hospital, like Kim Beom's kettle, iron and radio. Topological rearrangement, as in The Chronology, MVRDV and collage/1: rearrangement by relations and infrastructure (the city-field), like a sorting algorithm.

Field, direction, flux: conflicting directions act as an underlying force, a field, and these forces create flux. It is necessary to understand physical fields better and to consult calculus. At first there is one direction; later it disperses in many. Acting on the 3D structure: originally the same normal vector, vertical rise only (elevation, stacking), one goal. But the city-field scatters the normal vectors of the urban structure in all directions, enabling distortion, bending, folding, the Busan fish cake: overlapping, collapse, superimposition. The underlying city-field overlaps and becomes volumetric in 3D.

Dimensional transformation: urban structure 2D → 3D → 4D; city-field 1D → 2D → 3D; the derivative of the city-field 0D → 1D → 2D. Differentiation f → f' → f'' → f''' (Deleuze). The city-field is the derivative of urban structure, its virtuality, and this differentiated force controls the urban structure. Interaction and multi-device web artwork work likewise: they control an externally represented structure at the differential level. That is the will to power, and that is the appeal of interaction. The same principle appears in Rafael Lozano-Hemmer's Pulse experiments, and in Archizoom and the destruction in Bologna.

City; city-field; city-field-field; city-field-field-field, and so on. How far into the substructure can one go? A multiply colliding structure, like Inception. When Banpo Xi is differentiated, it becomes clear how thin its substance was. For the calculus of the city-field, consult multivariable calculus (Thomas' Calculus, chapter 15, double and triple integrals). Everyone competes along the same normal vector towards the same goal and ascent; then a natural collapse?

Snowpiercer as post-structuralism: not advancing to the front of the train (reductionism) but going out the side of the train, destructuring the structure. Interaction, that is action, adjusts the city-field: tearing, pasting, cutting and joining it. These actions are actualised underneath. A natural design is needed between navigating the city and adjusting the city-field. The final output is an urban system that keeps evolving through the city-field.

21 August 2025

The circular relation of three: hope, happiness, future. Fashion and design trend cycles work similarly: high-end, pop, minimalist, then high-end again. This is a simulacral cycle, all exchanges of signs, a circular futility; Nietzschean eternal recurrence. The way to play with it is to accelerate the cycle, to spin the cogwheel faster: how cute and futile the hamsters inside become. Happiness-hope-future, iron-kettle-radio, Banpo Xi-cram school-psychiatric hospital, high-end-pop-minimal: the stability of the structure of three, and its permutability, with signs shifting one place along, the fluidity of signs.

What system is being built? What is this system? Why build it? Why three? On what structural stability does it rest? Each answer: three.

Mobile interaction is an expression of desire: cutting a flow and, in cutting it, connecting it to another machine; cutting and extracting flows of desire to make them work. Interaction on the 2D map, playing that adjusts the city-field, affects the 3D city, later including the 3D-isation of the 2D city-field itself.

Large-screen output within a cityscape collage raises the problem of 3D navigation. Seeing a cityscape collage from one viewpoint is meaningless; navigation must allow free viewing from many angles. This is solved by 2D map navigation on the phone, synced intuitively to 3D, with zoom, panning, pinching and rotating reflected immediately. Map-like navigation, but this map operates at the differential level of the city-field. How to implement that?

Multi-audience handling: when several phones navigate the map, how do they affect the city-field? With a single visitor it is enough to sync to that phone. With N ≥ 2, the conflict becomes narratively useful, the nC2 again. N = 1 is one vector, one direction, one normal vector. With N ≥ 2, a vector space opens between two vectors; vectors can be spanned between them, and any vector in that space is in a state of indeterminacy, able to take any value within the span, a spectrum. No single wave is the right answer. Dimensions increase: N = 1 is one-dimensional, fixed to one normal vector; N = 2 is two-dimensional, a planar vector space in which the vector can take any value; N = 3 is three-dimensional, with still greater freedom.

A single vector is a single way of success, a single (lambda, t, phi), a single "Es muss sein": competition in the manner of the national university entrance exam and of Banpo-Xism, where only higher is right, the consumption of numbers, competition hung on a single figure. In 2D, a vector span appears between (lambda1, t1, phi1) and (lambda2, t2, phi2), and there is room to breathe: the source of emergence and complexity, of indeterminacy, chance, fluidity and self-evolution. In 3D, dimensions increase in differential space: the desiring machine, the will to power. More phones mean more dimensions, playing an ever-expanded set of dimensions, a realisation of differential will. Perhaps insert another city slice, like a pizza?

Map-based interaction is the most natural and familiar. Many children and many people can interact simultaneously. A personalised state (N = 1) is given at first, but later, even when many people arrive at once, the effect should still be emergent, immersive and intuitive. The result should be intuitive and chaotic, yet a chaos one can control enough to recognise one's own interaction. With many users (N = 10), each interacting separately, it should not be too confusing, and each person's contribution should be clearly signified. Are there references for this? Interference between waves is welcome: it is emergence. The base rules of this emergence and multi-user design must be simple. Should something representing each person (a colour, a neighbourhood, a nickname) be reflected in the interaction? Rather than individual control, broad collective control: "the will of interaction and its result". What is adjusting or interacting with the city-field? Adjusting a field. If too abstract, it may backfire. A natural harmony?

Combinations of pattern: the space of the map holds infinite possible combinations, infinite patterns and spaces, and the work should affirm them and open a space where people can play as freely as possible. Koo Jeong A's skateboarding work is a reference: the spatial and sculptural elements shared by a skatepark contain infinite patterns and spaces, and inside it one meets countless curves that software can neither solve nor complete, a dynamics of forms both regular and free, shaped by the use of skateboarding, a distinctive result that represents relations. For interaction, the materials are the map and navigation: affirm them as they are.

Affirm the map. The map is the material; start naturally from it. More precisely, the city-field is the underlying field on which all calculation is based. Recombination: the possibilities of recombination, as in the tangram. Field, landscape, environment, topology, dynamism, evolution, process: the informal shape of a differential order.

The role of interaction: differentiation, the city-field, latent relations. To change or recombine the whole urban structure, interaction is applied on the differential side, the city-field.

The problem of scale: an enormous city fragment joining onto small ones (Banpo Xi?), a V-effect.

From static to dynamic: self-generating, flowing. A living, breathing city expands and contracts with a certain periodicity. A city's night landscape is completed by flashing lights, building lights each blinking with its own periodicity and therefore, overall, complex and emergent; this is how the city breathes. Lights switching off and on, scales growing and shrinking: each element has a periodicity, but all periodicities differ, which overall creates visual emergence, the true image of the city. Visual tests should go beyond static situations to such dynamic, periodic ones.

Flow as changing places: with N places and N − 1 objects, things can always remain fluid, a flow is generated: the Deleuzian will of N − 1, as in the sliding-block puzzle Rush Hour. Because there is an empty place, endless changes of position, and multiplication through those changes, become possible, producing an endlessly dynamic, living city. Does topological transformation ultimately make the city breathe? Ceaseless variation, self-collage.

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