# 칙칙한 도시 위에 Colourfulness

Canonical URL: https://jeanyoon.ch/oi/texts/banpo-xism-artist-notes-2025-08-18
Type: essay / research note
Author: Jeanyoon Choi (최정윤)
Date: 2025-08-18

## Full text

Mobile interface interaction: should "happiness" and "hope" be displayed explicitly, as signs, referents, text? Or in an abstracted way? The way of colour coding? There are a great many ways to show and express "happiness" on a map! Explicit or non-explicit? Performative or non-performative? City tiles: abstract them and show them as colour? And the more this accumulates, the higher the happiness index goes.

Colour coding, putting on colour: like the way films are shown as colour (compressing films into colour to summarise their running time). The colour of the city is... originally drab. It was drab. On top of this city's colour, joy too? Colourfulness? A work of putting augmented colour on it. Like the implicit way a film's running time is shown in colour. Or The Grand Budapest Hotel.

A systemic approach: in the end, isn't the goal to make one urban-fabric system, a system transformed by the city-field, a self-evolving system that rolls along and evolves by itself! Forms of agency. Structural: the stability of "3"? When several mobiles connect at once: what phenomenon? Editing, tilting. Urban fabric going back and forth, self-evolving: staged naturally? What is the city-field? What is replication? Why is urban fabric replicated? Why are city blocks topologically recomputed and restructured?

Initial staging: like Minecraft. In the beginning there was nothing... then the map forms and the 3D model grows. The fun of staging: the fun of collage, the fun of navigation. The map, as you please... almost as if playing Minecraft.

Problems to solve:
- The problem of the map-field. What is the map-field? How is it distorted? Elevate, repeat, replace each part? Is there a visual language beyond these? Topological operations: how can the concept of a map-field become intuitive? Physical associations for the map-field: distortion? The theory of relativity? Gravitation? Network? Is there a most "natural", most "physical" way of representation? When building such a system, a map-field, don't make too many assumptions; finish it as cleanly as possible. Minimum combination of rules induce emergent behaviour (the principle of complexity science).
- The problem of staging.
- The problem of narrative.

Reductionist rules: happiness, the interaction scale? happiness × 3 = hope, hope × 3 = future? How naturally and intuitively will visitors take in such rules? Isn't there a more intuitive referent? A trade-off between staging and system?

Urban fabric: megastructures. Research the city collage and city-field I want to make within an architectural and urban context. Kenzo Tange's Plan for Tokyo? Rem Koolhaas? Azabudai Hills? The modularity of urban fabric?

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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.