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Jeanyoon Choi (b.1999) is a Computational Artist researching in interconnectivity and complexity through Multi-Device Web Artworks.

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jeanyoon.ch@oi /oi % cat banpo-xism-artist-notes-2025-09

Banpo-Xism Artist Notes: September 2025

2025-09-16

1 September 2025

Two core questions open the month. How can happiness, hope and future be designed so that they affect the 3D scene naturally? And how can emergence be induced smoothly once there are two or more participants, N >= 2?

Each mobile phone is imagined as a different field: a distinct city-field with its own wave character. Each phone works at once as a field and as an instrument. The reference is quantum field theory, in which a wave is the dynamic expression of a field. What sits on these fields could be likes, emojis, logos or other symbols. The goal is to threaten and shake the aggregate structure of signs, and to challenge the reductive "Xi-ism" that orders everything towards a single normal vector. Challenged sign structures scatter like diffuse reflection. Alternatively, two or more forces can collide at once, with attraction and repulsion acting together: this is the force of N >= 2. When two fields of different colours collide, the mixed field between them, and the differential field beneath it, brings force, collision and disturbance.

The normal vector gives the scheme a geometry. With N = 1 there is a single normal vector, and everything tries to climb in one direction only: Banpo-Xism as the vertical z-axis. With N >= 2 several normal vectors exist, and a plane opens between two of them; how to show this intuitively is an open question. With N >= 3 a space opens. Space itself, the invisible field, is the physical reality; what fills space is the field, a map of influence, and separate objects become an interconnected whole. The question is how confusion or provocation arises when there are several objects: a trigger for upheaval designed to emerge naturally from the overlap and collision of different fields. Physics is chosen because it is the most convenient way to model the N >= 2 case, through differential equations.

Mobile is an instrument. The notes call for Dionysian affirmation, force and destruction: touching and stroking the screen at enormous speed, as in endless fast scrolling, so that the surface itself becomes the event. Steve Jobs' claim that the finger is the best device is taken literally: the finger is the finest instrument. There is an excess of happiness, a virus, a system overload, with Baudrillard's simulacrum in the background. Each phone is a sketchbook or a musical stave, and the different staves collide, harmonise and form harmony. Like DNA's A, C, G and T, a small range of ingredients should yield a combinatorial explosion. The task is to design one stave: a Cartesian plane, a vector space in which possible solutions can exist.

What is Banpo-Xism here? Subjection to the system: the reduction of human beings to signs and numbers. Only one system rule is legitimate and every other is denied, because only one value is right, absolute, true and justified. In the age of AI this is an existential threat to human beings, and it is why the system, the game logic and the single vector must be resisted (the Omega problem). Each work has its own mode of resistance, the way a punctum or V-Effekt appears: in Omega it is shaking the phone; in SoTA it is turning the phone off; in Banpo-Xism it is N >= 2, interference between fields. When do fields bend, how do they bend collectively when N >= 2, and how are they interfered with? These questions are the core of the staging.

The essence of the apartment, and of Xi-ism, is copy and paste: apartments piled up as far as stacking allows. Is the apartment not the most Korean expression of all? The available parameters, language and visuals should be combined fully: location coordinates (x, y), stacking interval, rotation transform, explosion and colour. The instrument is a set of basic rules and pressable materials, a tool, a language, an available vector space, and the uncertainty of its combinations is a freedom to stack, enlarge and compose. Why are the city-fragments stacked along a vertical axis? Because stacking resembles the most Xi-ist, most Korean form of ranking. What is needed is not mere chaos but a controlled composition of refined parameters. The apartment itself need not be stacked; what matters is stacking some identical, reductive value in a Korean or Hong Kong manner, the manner of "terrible beauty": excess and overflow.

A block of notes headed August 2025 follows within this entry. On the map as instrument: reductionism means moving uncritically and blindly towards one purpose, while signs change places. A mix of parameters, obsessive repetition and overflowing happiness. Banpo Xi could easily be swapped for a psychiatric hospital; that is the nature of signs and the contradiction of the modern system. In some parallel world a psychiatric hospital might occupy Banpo Xi's place as the object of social envy, and to a foreign eye, or an alien one, Banpo Xi and the many cities like it may already look like psychiatric hospitals. The city could feature automatic displacement and exchange of positions, drifting and moving.

For changes of field, the references are MVRDV, Heatherwick's Azabudai Hills and Koo Jeong A's skateboarding works.

A dashboard or parametric interface could carry game-like, gamified elements without explicitly using the language of games such as points and scores. Instead it would use the language of Banpo Xi and of reality, emphasising the game-like side of neoliberalism: house prices, college entrance exam scores, a zero-sum game towards one identical score or value. Users should still be drawn intuitively into the game situation. Only the surface, the skin and the language, the signs, differ; underneath it is no different from game logic.

On navigation aesthetics, with Lev Manovich as reference: at first, simply navigating through the city might itself be enjoyable.

On energy as dramaturgy: energy is stored and then released. System overload builds tension; its release is the V-Effekt, disaster, the overflow of the Real. The death drive appears as the Real overflowing into the Symbolic, in disaster, revolution, war and epidemic. The overflow of the Real is the sudden discharge of energy that has condensed excessively in the Symbolic, and release of tension is pleasure. When countless Banpo Xi apartments, signs and happiness condense into an iron fortress (One Bailey), the energy for revolution and destruction is also at its greatest. A quoted passage notes that people take pleasure in seeing taboos and rules collapse in an instant, even violently, and that the pleasure of watching hardship, revolution and war lies in the release of tension. The sum of rational objects necessarily produces an eruption of rationality, self-contradiction, irrationality. With only one Banpo Xi there is tragedy: the system dominates. But when many Banpo Xis mix and tilt, the tragedy is caricatured. How absurd the sign they worshipped turns out to be. Tragedy becomes comedy.

On the direction of forces: following Deleuze's Francis Bacon: The Logic of Sensation, the work should paint not the visible but invisible forces, making the invisible visible. In Banpo-Xism force runs in one direction, along one vector. The goal is to apply force in many directions, and revolution happens through that. Not Pinocchio but an accordion: the urban fabric stretching and shrinking, like a pop tube. Compression, contraction and expansion of forces resemble Brownian motion; tension contracts and expands like an accordion or a spring, like moving molecules. Could the city-fragments move like an accordion? Transverse and longitudinal waves; the flow of a motorway.

Under the reductive formula of happiness, it is right that stacking simply increases as the happiness index rises, because that is reductionism: the only way is up. Staging this as smoothly as possible matters. In Banpo-Xism the direction of force is one-dimensional, only upward, and that is the reason for stacking. But at the moment Banpo-Xism dissolves, when different values are proposed and collide instead of a single value, when fields touch, connect, resonate and destroy one another, the direction of force is no longer one-dimensional but two- and three-dimensional. With N = 2 there is an angle between, and two vectors span a plane: force acting in two dimensions. With N = 3 there is a space between, and three vectors span a space. With N >= 4, if the vectors live in k dimensions, N vectors span min(k, N) dimensions. Visually, lifting from two to three dimensions is already hard; how could higher dimensions be shown?

Force must touch each field itself. The city-field is the form in which this force operates, and the question is how to set it working. Map-force, mobile interaction: Deleuze and Bacon again. The hand and touch, the finger as the best tool (Jobs again): the hand is our instrument, and that instrument touches the mobile. Immanent forces, intensities, formless sobbing forms, fluid exchanges of place. The city-field is made of differential forces and their crossings, and as forces cross, the city becomes a living, breathing being. Interaction rhythm is to be affirmed.

On techniques for designing automated systems: a higher-level understanding of happiness is needed, and the city as ecosystem must start from fundamentals. Where do emergence and complexity come from? Individual elements: city lights, subways going back and forth (noted as MTDBRI). The moment generating complexity becomes the goal, the work fails. Complexity must be a result: the sum of well-founded, intuitive, simple rules (differential equations) acting individually on each agent, each with its own periodicity and wave character, produces urban complexity as a whole. Where does wave character come from? Is a wave not defined as the solution of the wave equation, a partial differential equation? A city appears as the result of a system, the sum of higher-order differential equations for its individual agents. The whole system is the cumulative F, determined by f' and f'', not by F itself. The task is therefore not to find the solution x but to design the differential equation dx/dt = F(x) in which x can gradually develop, evolve, change and collide. This is the essence of interactive art: do not define the solution; define the differential equation in which solutions can exist, in a reading after Deleuze, Leibniz and Jang Yong-soon.

On continuity of interaction: finger-skating? What is instrumental interaction? The mobile should act as a differential field of force controlling the virtual, the will to power. This differential force changes surface relations, so the surface signs, such as Xi, belong on other screens. The mobile carries the underlying force, keywords such as happiness: desire-keywords, though this desire works in only one direction. The mobile should show only relations of force, their increase and decrease. A passage quoted on architecture expects contemporary architecture to become more sensitive to rates of change, standing shoulder to shoulder with calculus; MVRDV's work in particular derives building forms from masses of data and their changes. The diagram is a differential equation, and building from a diagram is solving it. By analogy, the map and mobile are the differential equation, and the city collage on the screens is its solving. A differential equation can have two or more solutions: an uncertainty principle, a state of continuous flux and floating. If architecture and philosophy understood differential equations superficially, metaphorically or conceptually, MDWA (multi-device web artwork) should be understood as directly designing the differential equation, with interacting audiences solving it themselves.

The final destination of the city spectacle is Times Square: urban complexity and emergence, a living, breathing city.

On the stability of three: fashions go round and round, produced by combinations of three signs, a circulation between goods or between signs. Happiness, logos and signs follow similar principles. The circulation among three signs is beautiful and fluid. On the mobile, signs combine in a surface structure of happiness, hope and future: a three-term sign structure, like A, C, G and T. The orders of a differential equation, f' to f'' to f''' to f'''', could correspond to a hierarchy of devices, each level matched to one derivative. Several mobiles each take partial derivatives in their own way, along their own gradients. If combinations of three signs are differentiated again and again, might they recur endlessly as three? Just as sinh and cosh return after two derivatives (f'' = f) and sin and cos after four (f'''' = f), consider f''' = f, solved by f = e^x + e^(-x/2)(cos((sqrt(3)/2)x) + sin((sqrt(3)/2)x)). Could f'''(x, y, z) = f(x, y, z) hold? This is how fashion circulates. Apartments are scarce goods: Banpo Xi, its design and its community management all look like a structure of ascent, ever better design, ever better community, yet in substance stay in place. Competition is driven by difference: the upper class creates difference, the middle class tries to close it (minimal marginal difference). Banpo-Xism as consumption is the minimal-marginal-difference consumption of dwelling.

On representing apartments: what is stacked need not be an apartment. Other symbols of happiness or scarcity may repeat endlessly. What matters is not the object of stacking (Banpo Xi) but the form of stacking, apartment-like, the terrible beauty of modern society, the endless repetition of car parks and the "dream of squares", which itself points to the apartment. An oblique approach criticises the apartment more strongly. Option 1 shows the apartment symbolically. Option 2 uses other, oblique symbols of happiness that overload and stack until they look like apartments.

On semiotics, from lecture material for a course on the aesthetics of plastic arts: concepts, entities and signs, where concepts represent entities, signs denote entities and signs identify concepts. A sign (representamen) stands for something else under a certain relation. Its three elements are the sign, the object and the interpretant, the content interpreted as the sign's meaning. Semiosis occurs when the sign is grasped as indicating the object. The interpretant becomes a second sign, generating a second interpretant of the object, which becomes a third sign generating a third interpretant, and so on. This is a chain of differentiation, f to f' to f'' to f''': the sign-interpretant chain working differentially, topologically, virtually, as a process of forces on the surface.

On destroying stable sign structures: the reductive Banpo-Xism and happiness structure must be destroyed, and importantly in a popular, accessible way. Chance without a code, resistance to codes, contingency that dismantles them: dismantling the system that fixes the signifier-signified relation, and especially the one that reinforces and fixes the signifier (Banpo-Xism).

On the living city, with Times Square as the example: billboards keep turning and playing, showing varied images, and the city-fragments should do the same, with constant exchanges of place and topological change. The whole urban space must be alive, moving and evolving by itself according to particular physical laws, as the expression of the sum of those laws (differential equations) in the domain of their solutions. That is the vitalist city, the living, breathing complex-system city: Times Square. Each billboard there is bound to specific rules, commercial logic and advertising staging (equations, flows of force), yet together they make one emergent spectacle.

The mobile is an instrument, in differential relations f, f', f'', f''', or as wholly opposed terms (a PDE in which each partial variable is a field, fields colliding). Like a MIDI controller, the mobile is the simplest instrument, and N people with N instruments each explore something different, with different configuration sets for the ensemble. The three terms sometimes diverge, sometimes oppose and sometimes relate, and the continuous development, destruction, rise and fall of the city they produce together (the solution of the equation, the operation of forces) creates a tense flow of city-fragments that never stands still and evolves rhythmically. Each mobile acts as one city-field, resembling the many subjects living in a city. The sum of rationalities producing irrationality, individual efforts at optimisation producing crowd-scale irrationality and emergence: not a simple wave function of a single phase but different wave functions superposed into a Fourier series.

On the map collage: tourist maps, Naver Map, satellite maps, real-estate maps; tiling. To draw a map, do not draw the map. The key is to explore the underlying lines and connections; a map is ultimately lines, relations and flows (relations, fields, differential effects). The lesson of Ryoji Ikeda: do not draw a city as surfaces. Fill it with the derivative of surfaces, lines (pathways), or the derivative of lines, points.

The mobile is a grid, starting from a blank canvas: a city-field in which a physical field can be built, an intensely Cartesian space. When the values of happiness, hope and future fill it, reductive competition executes. Just an abstract field in itself, in the minimalist lineage of Donald Judd and Dan Flavin. Rotate, pin and zoom (navigation) would then affect the output. The mobile is both an instrument and a score, and everyone holds a different score.

4 September 2025

Apart from a long run of laughter, this entry is a list of references. For cities: Refik Anadol's work on the future of the city, MIT's work on cityscapes, and ShibuyaCrowd. For instrumental interaction, quite literally: the studio Daily tous les jours. For web instruments: Chrome Music Lab's Strings, a keyboard, and the Google Arts & Culture experiment Blob Opera (https://artsandculture.google.com/experiment/blob-opera/AAHWrq360NcGbw). Under "Space", three Korean blog posts are bookmarked.

10 September 2025

Desire is temporary, but the change desire brings remains permanently. The desire is Banpo-Xism; what is permanent is the city. Each system is reductive, overly specialised and fragmented; the work mixes and disturbs these systems. One mode, one sign equals one field, one direction, and the work challenges this (N >= 2). The basic interaction grammar is finger-skating on mobile: participants create their own field, skating smoothly across the grid on the phone with a finger to adjust it.

In differential terms, the system or output is F and the input from the mobile is f = F' = dF/dt. What does it mean for interaction to be instrumental? Input and output generally sit in different dimensions with respect to time. Interaction is the power of the derivative, a change in the system, the power of delta. Input provides a temporary flow or flux to the system: a rate of change, a delta, a derivative. That derivative, the will of the differential field, affects the whole system.

The same holds for architecture and the city. A city is a system, a total aggregate, the sum of continuous change (F). Building and demolition supply the temporary terms of change (the differential, F'), and this time-dependent construction follows the temporary, short-sighted desires of its era. Desire (Banpo-Xism, the derivative) is temporary, but the change it brings (the city) remains forever. If input and output are identical, that is at most direct manipulation. Input should be the derivative of output. Multi-mobile interaction means interference between different fields: a multidimensional differential equation, a third-order equation, a three-body problem, chaos and emergence.

A -> B is not B -> A. A -> B is the castrated sign, a first-order logical error; B -> A is a second-order logical error, and the same is true of Banpo Xi. As an A -> B -> A reinforcement loop, negative or positive, accelerates, it becomes ontologically no different from artificial intelligence. Escaping it is the logic of complex systems: the definition of complexity, the eruption of the Real. A -> B is the sign system, minimal marginal difference, Banpo Xi, the consumption of signs. B -> A is the illusion of essence: in the end the same lump of concrete, a castrated essence. Happiness becomes something to acquire, turned into a goal, an eruption of the Real: the error of reversing subject and predicate. Simulacra are phenomena more real than the real. Baudrillard: the territory no longer precedes the map or survives it; now the map precedes the territory, and the simulacra even produce the territory. A -> B is abstraction; B -> A' is the formation of the simulacrum, a castrated original.

Baudrillard's The Consumer Society: we chase only the signs of affluence (Banpo-Xism, location as sign, minimal marginal difference). This is ultimately a discussion of sign-structuralism, and of what happens when one structure collides with another (collisions between fields). What stones sit on these fields, on this canvas, on the mobile, as on a go board? Signs: H/H/F, happiness, hope and future, the signs and target values of contemporary capitalism. They form a system of equivalence, fluid, circulating and monetary, but disaster follows the moment the sign itself becomes the goal, the moments when A -> B turns into B -> A. Baudrillard (The Consumer Society, p. 25): those blessed with the miracle of consumption also build an imitation of happiness and its characteristic apparatus of signs, then wait for real happiness to land there. Affluence is the accumulation of signs of happiness, the illusion of a dreamland, hope for a future that will not arrive. Is the city-field being made a field of signs? And why does it operate differentially?

11 September 2025

This entry is empty.

15 September 2025

What is Banpo-Xism? It is the highest good of our time, the highest value, the absolute standard, a categorical imperative, a rule applied to everyone without exception. Banpo Xi is the best beauty available to us, the goal of life, a myth that must be praised.

A passage on the will to power in Banpo-Xism follows. The proposal criticises the will to power appearing in distorted, reduced form. The desire to go higher, to a better apartment, is in essence a manifestation of the will to power, the wish to expand one's life. But once it is trapped in a single value system, the Symbolic order of floor area, school district and house price, creative and varied possibilities of life are castrated and it degenerates into endless competition in one direction, vertical ascent. The will to power then manifests not in a positive, creative direction but in a wasteful, uniform one.

16 September 2025

The entry poses a research question, written as a prompt. Investigate every case in semiotics of a third-order derivative, f''' = f, where differentiation may be meant literally or in the Deleuzian sense, and examine how this relates to f''' = f in mathematics. Compare f''' = f acting on a single variable x with f'''(x, y, z) = f(x, y, z) acting on three entangled variables. Has the former been interpreted in semiotics? The latter? In the latter case, can the stable structure of signs, a structure that evolves stably by itself through f''' = f, be challenged more strongly, through collisions among different fields? The question is to be answered semiotically and philosophically, and also mathematically and physically. A closing note links dynamics, differential equations and topology.

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