# 도시는 거대한 피아노 건반이 된다

Canonical URL: https://jeanyoon.ch/oi/texts/banpo-xism-artist-notes-2025-08-01
Type: essay / research note
Author: Jeanyoon Choi (최정윤)
Date: 2025-08-01

## Full text

I want to redesign the Banpo-Xist, grid-like city in a topological, relational, lived and psychogeographic form, via an interaction that plays the city like an instrument and strolls it like a flaneur.

Topological rearrangement:
- from the 2D map, a simulacral, Procrustean map, to a 3D map
- from physical adjacency to semantic adjacency

Could a single scene be an emergent network? How is such a network made? Interaction supplies the raw material, and 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 the system. But what happens when interaction goes beyond the norm, beyond the limits the system was designed for, and when that interaction arrives through play, through the playing of an instrument? The rules are overloaded, the original system itself breaks down, and a phase transition appears. Example: fast-forwarding a video, a hundred times over. A kind of hacking happens along a spatial-temporal dimension.

On topological transformation: physical adjacency becomes semantic adjacency? The given rules, the ones taken for granted at the level of reality, are reinterpreted at a non-essential, sensory, virtual level? Resonance and folding. In the end it is a change of viewpoint, away from "simple representation", "grounded in reality", "Euclidean-Cartesian", "clear and distinct". A different evaluation. Psychogeography: evaluation made through the individual's interaction, from the subject's point of view. Relations: new relations endlessly regenerated and destroyed.

Map, network, topological-connective reconstruction: that is why the line matters. Transport? Flow?

Multi-user interaction as a physical and network simulation. At first the played city fragments just stay where they are, standing still. With two or more people interacting, the fragments acquire a stronger cohesion between them: gravitation, electromagnetic force. One person is a node in itself. Two or more people make n nodes, and every edge between them: nC2. Following these forces, these relations, this set of topological lines, the whole space is distorted and restructured. PSYCHOGEOGRAPHY. A Deleuzian fold!

Interaction on the mobile: at first a grid (blank space, Cartesian). Tapping a particular spot on the grid materialises a building or a piece of urban fabric as a wireframe. Playing it once more turns it into a 3D model, a digital twin: from the abstract to the concrete.

The two-dimensional city is augmented and reinterpreted in three dimensions through tension, relations and topological operations. Inspiration from Inception: folds, pleats. The Situationist International's The Naked City stayed only in 2D. Making it 3D is our goal.

From the existing understanding of the city (Euclidean grid / tree / disentanglement / top-down / Xism), through interaction (city flaneur / instrument), to a topological, relational reconstruction (chaosmos / rhizome / entanglement / bottom-up (ABM) / semi-lattice).

The Centre Pompidou! Richard Rogers! He put all the relational terms on the outside. He put all the relational terms on the outside... and so it can be refitted! Not the appearance of the city itself, but the relational terms lying beneath it (topological relations, symbolic water mains and drains, transport networks, every kind of "network"): reinterpreting them, playing them, putting an effect on them.

Playing the city, playing a 3D model of the city, does not mean letting people click each building one by one, like quanta. To play the city is to awaken the "relational networks" lying beneath it (transport above all), its topological structure, its virtuality, and through this to look at the city again!

All the relational forces, all the excrement, placed on the outside.

One comes to play-stroll the city. The city becomes, say, a gigantic piano keyboard. And this playing begins to recompute and reconstruct, topologically, the relations between urban elements, beyond the composition of the city as we originally 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 (superficial) appearance called "the city".

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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.