# 규칙을 너무나도 잘 따르기: 시스템 과부하 Canonical URL: https://jeanyoon.ch/oi/texts/banpo-xism-artist-notes-2025-08-07 Type: essay / research note Author: Jeanyoon Choi (최정윤) Date: 2025-08-07 ## Full text A strategy, a method of destructuring: "system overload". The rules of repetition melt into the interaction, gradually mixing and destructuring, until the original grids are nowhere to be seen. This destructuring is not a problem caused by failing to keep the rules. On the contrary, it is an error produced by keeping the rules far too well, by carrying out the rule, the command, endlessly! System overload challenges the myth of algorithmic objectivity. An artistic repetition aimed at the reductionism of single-metric governance: the ultimate poverty and meaninglessness of a one-dimensional pursuit of happiness. A kind of "phase transition" occurs... There is a system that has been running (Banpo-Xism). Intermittent, ordinary, everyday interaction keeps it working. But when an enormous amount of interaction arrives, interaction beyond a certain limit... SYSTEM MALFUNCTIONING! A phase transition happens. The system's former categorical imperatives (Banpo-Xism; compete; stay inside the lines; fight for the square; reductionist ideology) collapse and are destroyed! Through an entirely different topological transition! Now an emergent system takes their place. The individualistic system that had been running... slaves... Through overflow interaction, instrumental interaction: an organism forms! Dionysus! One vast network. Self-generation, self-production, self-performed topological relations, self-occurrence, self-multiplication. An invitation to the true city, to true "dynamics". City fragments keep moving, being generated, emerging. Too much is as bad as too little: and that is the way to hack the system, by overloading it. The elephant and the blind men System output: the urban system is enormous. A virtuality, a system behind. But each output screen or scene captures only part of it, like the blind men and the elephant. With 0 people: the square itself, trapped in the rule itself. With 1 person: playing begins, signs of departure. But the departure happens slowly. With 2 people: a network forms, destruction in all directions. The nC2 revolution, the onset of a "phase transition". A fluid city, a network, the discovery of the infrastructure. Shifts of terrain, shifts of perception: not simply geometric or formal, but topological, relational, essential change. The city: an order castrated inside a square, a stuffed and mounted order, a Procrustean bed, Banpo-Xism... But trapped beneath this frame is the force of the real, the force of the city, humanity's greatest invention (chaosmos). And its topological, relational structure, its revolutionary potential. This is a project to rediscover the infinite potential found within it! Beneath the paving stones, the beach! An abstracted, repressed combination of signs, trapped under the logic of optimisation, under the logic of minimal marginal difference: Banpo-Xism, real estate, routes, school districts. Perceiving the city not as "smell" or "substance" but as "numbers" and "squares"... Baudrillard, Simulacra. VIA INTERACTION The collapse of these signs. Zoom out. Substantiation, the counterattack of the urban structure. The counterattack of the "beach" that had been flattened, castrated, Xi-ised. Not a zoom-out in the sense of camera angle but a zoom-out, an essential change, in a conceptual context. Onto the existing urban structure, "the return of the real" is overlaid. ZOOM OUT: the elephant and the blind men. From the castrated city (real-estate, optimised, flat, square: the state of the blind men), ZOOM OUT to the elephant itself, and reinterpret the topological, relational, wave-like, resonant aspects of the city lying beneath (humanity's greatest invention). Parametric interface The everyday interface (a repressed structure), and the system that was hidden beneath it. Transforming signs, hacking the structure that connects signs, caricatures this repressed structure. Every modern system has a fixed "available capacity" and "used capacity"... the moment it is exceeded, malfunctioning. Through this malfunctioning, out of the box... If you run, circulate the system excessively... how does this connect to a zoom-out punctum? Through instrumental interaction! Playing the city, showing the abstracted, castrated city as a concrete, 3D object. On the "normal" "Normal", "everyday" flows (in fact abnormal, forcibly covering the real with the symbolic order, forcing it to stand under that order). But these flows, too, cannot escape "the return of the real". The return of the real via repetition compulsion. Not so much rebelling against the flow and the rules as following them... following them far too "well"! Following so well that the flow overflows, the system overloads, and so in the end the system collapses: the symbolic order finally collapses, "the return of the real". These flows: traffic flows, capital flows (real estate, finance, etc.), the capitalisation, signification and quantification of objects. Traffic lights: the archetypal symbolic order, the representation of rules. A [flow of the real] arises that escapes the abstract frame of signs, the sign system, the symbolic order. Or CCTVs, control-room aesthetics (the systems of the symbolic order that control the city, that control the real). Flows: escalators and elevators. Junk spaces. Target audience: families with young children, students (middle and high school). Interaction? Lifting the ground (Heatherwick), Azabudai Hills. The concept of the city-field Some kind of underlying city-field, city-force (like an electromagnetic field). If this field receives just one small stimulus, there is no particular response. But when several stimuli arrive at the same time, interconnection forms and emergence occurs. Emergence, network formation. Madness / collage / text-collage (Dada) / repetition compulsion / exceeding (amplifying) / torn apart, punctum. The city-score Five places: not the places as they are, not 3D modelling, but something like a "score"... yet not a score pre-defined for the performer; one that keeps evolving according to the feedback loop in the structure of the city-field. Playing the city-score creates distortion in the whole city-field. It means bringing a flow of waves, of interaction, into the grid-like, motionless city-field. It is not a simple touch, a process of "revealing" what sits on top. These are scores that call up waviness in the middle of gridness, and actualise the latent waviness... Control room: the everyday (as it was) distribution structure... the symbolic order, periodicity, the "normal"... in fact, what was taken as "normal" was "abnormal": an indictment! And this is an attack by the city-field, an attack of waviness: an indictment of the abnormal, the return of the real! The city-field... is it ultimately a network? The subway map, the virtual, the infrastructure. Network: a diagram of relations, from point A to point B. The urban sensations we perceive... are in the end a controlled, castrated image. Much of modern people's lives is repressed by the city's order, its symbolic structure (commuting and traffic jams, the absence of time and leisure, the absence of freedom, real estate and house prices). Many modern problems are problems of the city, too. Indict this repressive structure as temporary, simulacral, symbolic. Imagine and think about a return of the real beyond this repressive structure. The city-field, a virtual structure. Distorting the city-field: give it gravitation ten times, a hundred times its mass! A transformation of the hierarchies, dynamics and topological relations of urban components. Folding, distortion, network, exaggeration. Through the exaggeration of flow. Warhol/Gursky: amplifying and repeating the object. Making the flow of the object excessive: an eruption of the real. A natural disaster: the stopping of the object, the destruction of everything artificial. Keep the system's rules, carry them out exactly, but carry them out a hundred times over. In the end, pursuing an abnormality of scale (excessive flow, an excessive outpouring of the real). And this distortion of the city-field. Happiness, hope, future city: amplify this. Change of the base: change this structure and thereby change the superstructure. Interaction input: bricolage. --- 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.