# 희망 = 2 X 행복 Canonical URL: https://jeanyoon.ch/oi/texts/banpo-xism-artist-notes-2025-08-08 Type: essay / research note Author: Jeanyoon Choi (최정윤) Date: 2025-08-08 ## Full text It's hopeful! It's happy! It's futuristic! This flow: exaggerate the happy flow. Hope, happiness and future: slogans. The exaggeration of these slogans! Is there anyone who dislikes them? Does anyone dislike hope, happiness, the future? But exaggerate this flow... and they become hateful! Burdensome! A critique of the middle class, of the bourgeoisie. HHF! Excessive happiness! Excessive hope! Excessive future! What do I want to say? It is not so much that I have something to say as just repeating blindly! Pushing through by sheer quantity! Why? Because happiness, hope, future... are all good words! I just repeat them blindly: happiness! hope! future! Because in fact, to be happy... (to satisfy infinite desire), prices have to go up more! The roads have to be more jammed! Terribly so! BRUCE NAUMAN ROBERT INDIANA More! More! Happier! More futuristic! More hopeful! Happiness as a "slogan", the law of happiness, the happiness circuit. An exchange law among happiness, future and hope. hope = 2 × happiness, future = happiness + hope With happiness, hope and future as three elements, like A/C/G/T, build up different futures. Make something that is extremely rational in itself, and therefore all the more absurd. Look at it critically, but in the most optimistic way. The most political way: similar to Ai Weiwei's Study of Perspective. The illusion that "happiness" itself can be a goal. A critique of the purposiveness of happiness, of reductionist logic: a critique of reductionism, a critique of Cartesianism. Why speak about the arithmetic of happiness, hope and future through the language of the city? A critique of capitalism; it is also a critique of the asset. The law of the pursuit of happiness: accumulate happiness and it becomes hope; accumulate hope and it becomes the future (a kind of exchange law). Nationwide gaslighting, similar to the university entrance system: good exam → good grades → good school → good job → rich → happy! Reductive causality! Two levels of critique: - happiness-as-purpose, happiness-as-slogan, reductionism, the petit bourgeoisie: a critique of Banpo-Xism - a critique of the wealth gap and social inequality: what happens if only one area keeps getting interaction hope = 3 × happiness, future = 3 × hope. future = 9 × happiness 13 × happiness = future + hope + happiness Reductionist ideology. 1984 → but rather, The Capitalism That Sells Happiness. If there is the establishment of an order, there must also be an exchange of orders. Just tapping the button might be too game-like. Escaping the rules of the given, presented algorithm; twisting the semiotic structure of the given rules. Flipping over the game "board". --- 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.