# 무한한 욕망과 2048 메타포 Canonical URL: https://jeanyoon.ch/oi/texts/banpo-xism-artist-notes-2025-08-17 Type: essay / research note Author: Jeanyoon Choi (최정윤) Date: 2025-08-17 ## Full text Long text 1. Background, intention and narrative of the work 2. The city-field, urban virtuality, topological operations 3. The overall structure: multi-device structure, input-system-output, map 4. Interaction, experience, takeaway This work dismantles the superficial, commercial nature of contemporary society, which reduces complex human values such as "happiness, hope and future" to simple numbers, and overturns its structure. Paying particular attention to how such values form the base of urban structure, it digs into the symbiotic relationship between the reductive pursuit of happiness symbolised by so-called "Banpo-Xism" and the structure of the city. Rather than destroying the system directly, the work's narrative lets the audience's countless interactions make the system succeed excessively, so that it reveals its own inherent emptiness and absurdity. This strategy of system overload is achieved in a paradoxical way: by filling the city with compulsive happiness. The work realises the city through the concept of a "City-Field", which includes relations, virtuality and topological structure beyond physical structures. Reconstructed in real time according to the audience's interaction, the City-Field dynamically weaves together map data, 3D models and many cross-sections of the city. Instead of representing the city in a fixed form, it reveals the invisible infrastructure and virtuality, offering a chance to see the existing city as a new relational structure. As a multi-device web artwork, the work consists of three main areas: "input", "system" and "output". The audience first produces happiness with a smartphone on the "input" screen, and this act manipulates the City-Field and changes the 3D model in real time. In the central "system" area, a touch interface gives the chance to modify or overturn the operating principles of the City-Field itself. All of these interactions appear through the "output" as the city's many cross-sections. A real-estate price map, an apartment shopping-arcade directory, real-time public transport information and so on are output in fragments, as if blind men were touching an elephant, forming a feedback loop in which the audience immediately sees the effect of its actions on the simulated urban environment. The audience's experience is designed to shift from naive participation to critical awareness. At first, a simple tap alone raises the "happiness" index, which, by the system's satirical exchange law, chains into "hope" and "future" and causes visible changes such as tearing down the old city and building "Banpo Xi". But as collective participation over-accumulates "happiness", the process gradually becomes caricatured and absurd. Further, the audience can intervene in the system interface and directly overturn the reductionist laws of happiness. For example, a play of signs becomes possible in which the chain of signs is deliberately twisted to place a psychiatric hospital where Banpo Xi should be. This exposes how commodified values dominate the city's underlying structure and produce empty results, while offering a chance to overturn that sign structure, and invites deep reflection on the reductionist values of the contemporary city. Notes Gamifying the city? How do I design the interaction? A happiness index rising in real time: house prices, land rents and so on. Derived indices. Cycle, reduction, rule, law, deconstruction, destruction, destructuring, de-ruling. A three-part structure: the stability of the number 3. Cycle: everything shifts one place along. System config adjust: destructuring an orderly set of system rules, the existing system structure. Signifier and signified: pushing them one slot along. Kim Beom's example: iron - kettle - radio, each use value pushed along by one. HHL + Banpo-Xism: loosely connected two artworks? HHL: practical, interaction-driven. Banpo-Xism: uses the same interactive language as HHL, adds a critical dimension. The same game, the same interaction, is repeated twice: the first time experientially, the second time critically. Once as tragedy (comedy), once more as comedy (tragedy). The version without referents: numbers, just a simple collage. The 2048 metaphor. The happy but ignorant version: the Matrix's blue pill. Happiness, future, hope. The version with referents: explanations of happiness, hope and future. Caricaturing the referents, exposing the reductive structure (the return of the real). Banpo Xi, reductive rules. Interaction: the 2048 metaphor. The 2048 game: at first you optimise with an objective function. Once you are fairly practised, it can be handled automatically, instrumentally. When the board gets bigger (6 × 6), the game is endless... a combinatorially explosive combination. Similarly: the city's organic fabric, collaged wildly? Grid: postcolonialism? The cut-up technique? Dada? Decoupe. Infinite possibilities. A game form that can be sustained infinitely? Changing the city's structure, assembling it, like LEGO. The rules of the game, and navigation (a navigation aesthetic). How do I control so many things all at once? Simple is the best: one simple interaction language. Use the map as material. Tapping like the 2048 game? What interface will I make? A rising happiness index? The simplest interaction: the answer lies in simple places... What grammar? Tapping and increase? What kind of tapping? The map: two interactions on mobile, navigation and touching/tapping. That they cannot happen at the same time is not a limitation but a strength. Infinite desire: the representation of infinite desire, the obsession with reductionist desire (the happiness rule). The craving for higher scores, bigger numbers → gamification is the key. The "gamification" of all of life, of every element of society, is at the core. "Play": addictivity is an EXTREMELY important factor. Infinite desire: it can be lifted infinitely along the z-axis. The 2D map: lifting. An infinitely rising vertical city. An obsession with the infinite? Infinite and finite. Lifting the city: Azabudai Hills, city fragments being lifted. HHL: a slightly altered version, a slightly buggy version. A slip. Infinity. Infinite transformation, infinite stacking. But as it becomes infinite... resources are used proportionally more, yet desire, through minimal marginal difference and comparison with others, always remains lacking. The city of desire: Rem Koolhaas, New York. The same interaction logic: a completely different result. Like Gentle Monster's Haus Nowhere, with upper, middle and lower floors all different? All heterogeneous objects mixed together! Flat city != vertical city? Will we be able to build a utopia? Today's utopia: Banpo Xi. Reductive. A boring vertical city, everything facing the same normal vector. Style: pop, pink, kitsch? "Happiness": a combination of images that can be staged. --- 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.