# 해를 규정하지 마라, 미분방정식을 규정하여라 Canonical URL: https://jeanyoon.ch/oi/texts/banpo-xism-artist-notes-2025-09-01 Type: essay / research note Author: Jeanyoon Choi (최정윤) Date: 2025-09-01 ## Full text Key questions Q1. How do I design it so that happiness, hope and future affect the 3D scene naturally? Q2. How do I smoothly induce emergence when N >= 2? Each mobile, a different "field". Different city-fields. Each has its own field. Waviness. Homogenisation of the field-waves? Each mobile works as a "field" and as an "instrument". Quantum field theory: a wave is the dynamic expression of a field. On the field: likes, emojis, logos? What kind of symbols? Our goal: to threaten and shake the aggregate structure of signs. To challenge the reductionist Xi-ism that is ordered toward one single normal vector. Challenged sign structures: diffuse reflection. Or the application of attraction and repulsion, two or more forces colliding at the same time: this is the force of N >= 2. The force of N >= 2: when two different fields, two fields of different colours, collide, the mixed field between them (and the differential field beneath it) brings force, collides, disturbs. Normal vector - N = 1: one normal vector, trying to climb in one direction only (Banpo-Xism: the vertical axis, the z-axis). - N >= 2: several normal vectors exist (how do I show this intuitively?) → a "plane" opens between two vectors. - N >= 3: a "space" opens. Space itself, the invisible "field" itself, is the physical reality. What fills space is the "field". Separate objects → an interconnected whole. Field: a map of influence. How does confusion, provocation, arise when N >= 2, when there are several objects? A trigger for upheaval, designed to arise naturally from the superposition and collision of different fields. Why follow the notions of physics, of physical systems? Because it is the most advantageous way to model the N >= 2 case (differential equations)! MOBILE IS AN INSTRUMENT Just go wild! Dionysus! Affirm! Affirm! Force! Destruction! Like scrolling on and on at enormous speed, at enormous speed... touching and touching, stroking... the screen itself, the surface itself... Look. (Steve Jobs) The finger is the best instrument, the best device! An excess of happiness. A virus. System overload (simulacrum, Baudrillard). A sketchbook, a musical stave. Each person's phone is an instrument, a stave. And the collision, accord and harmony between different staves. With a small range of ingredients (A, C, G, T), their combination must achieve a countless "combinatorial explosion". Like a stave... designing one stave, a Cartesian plane, a vector space (a space where possible solutions can exist). Banpo-Xism? Subjection to the system. The signification, reduction and quantification of human beings. Only a single system rule is justified. Everything else is denied. Because only one value is right, absolute, true and legitimate. This is an existential threat to human beings in the age of AI. The reason we must resist the system, the game logic, the vector (Ω). Modes of resistance (the ways the punctum, the V-Effekt, appears): - Omega: phone shake - SoTA: phone turn-off - Banpo-Xism: N >= 2, interference between "fields" When do "fields" bend? How does a field bend collectively, when N >= 2? How are fields "interfered"? This is the core of the staging. The core of the APT, the core of Xi-ism Copy and paste. Piling up APTs as much as stacking allows. Isn't this APT the most Korean expression of all? Combine the parameters, language and visuals I have now fully enough? - location coordinate (x, y) - stacking interval - transform rotation - explosion, colour Instrument: basic rules, materials you can press and use. This tool, this language, the available vector space. The uncertainty of this combination. The freedom to pile up, make big, combine. Why a stacked visual? Why are the city fragments stacked along the vertical axis? This resembles the most Xi-ist, the most Korean ranking. The most Korean ranking system. Not just wildly chaotic: a combination of refined parameters, a controlled composition, is needed... There is no need to stack apartments. Stacking something, some value (identical, reductionist values), in the Korean way, the Hong Kong way. Stacking in the manner of "terrible beauty": that itself is what matters. Terrible beauty. Excess. Overflowing. Earlier notes, headed August 2025 On the map-instrument: reductionism, heading uncritically and blindly toward one purpose. Signs: changing places. A mix of certain parameters, obsessive repetition, overflowing happiness. Banpo Xi can easily be turned into a psychiatric hospital. That is the nature of the sign, the contradiction of the modern system. In some parallel world, a psychiatric hospital might stand in Banpo Xi's place (the object of social envy). And in fact, seen through a foreigner's eyes, Banpo Xi is like a psychiatric hospital. (Or, seen through an alien's eyes, all those many cities look "mentally ill".) Automatic movement and exchange of places within the city (drifting, moving). Change of field: MVRDV, Heatherwick (Azabudai Hills), Koo Jeong A (skateboarding). Dashboard / parametric interface: game elements, gamification elements. But not by explicitly using the language of games, like points and scores; rather, the language of Banpo Xi, the language of reality, emphasising the game-like side of neoliberalism. House prices, suneung (entrance exam) scores, a zero-sum game toward the same score, the same value. While still letting users immerse themselves intuitively in the game situation. In other words, only the appearance, the skin, the language, the sign differ; in reality it is no different from the logic of a game. Navigation aesthetic: Lev Manovich. At first, simply navigating through the city might itself be fun. The perspective of energy (staging): storing energy... and then releasing it. System overload → tension builds up. Release of tension, V-Effekt, disaster, the flooding of the real. The death drive → the real flooding into the symbolic order (disaster, revolution, war, epidemic). The flooding of the real is the phenomenon in which, when the symbolic order's energy has condensed excessively, the condensed energy is released abruptly (release of tension: pleasure). When Banpo-Xism, the countless Banpo Xis, signs and happiness condense and build an iron fortress (One Bailey), the energy toward revolution, the energy toward destruction, also becomes greatest. "For example, people feel pleasure watching taboos and rules collapse in an instant, even if it is violent. The reason we feel pleasure watching hardship, revolution and war lies in the release of tension." The eruption of rationality, the self-contradiction, the irrationality that the sum of rational objects inevitably produces. When there is only one Banpo Xi: tragedy. The system dominates. But when many Banpo Xis are mixed and tilted, the tragedy is caricatured. How absurd the sign they worshipped was! Tragedy becomes comedy. The directionality of forces: we must paint not the visible but the invisible forces (Deleuze, The Logic of Sensation). Not showing the visible, but making the invisible visible. Banpo-Xism: force in one direction only. One vector only. One directionality only. The goal is to give this force many directions. Giving this force many directions, revolution happens. Pinocchio? Accordion! The urban fabric stretching, then shrinking. Pop tube. The action of forces. The action of forces. Compression, contraction, expansion: isn't Brownian motion exactly this kind of action? Contraction and expansion of tension: like an accordion, a spring (similar to the motion of molecules). Can city fragments also move like an accordion? Transverse and longitudinal waves. The flow of a motorway. Happiness: in the case of the reductionist formula, it is right that stacking simply increases as the happiness index rises. Because it is reductionism. The only way is up. Staging this as smoothly and well as possible is what matters. In Banpo-Xism the direction in which force acts is one-dimensional. Only the upward direction, the direction of ascent, exists. The reason for stacking. But the moment Banpo-Xism is dismantled: the moment we leave a single value, when different values are proposed and collide; the moment fields touch, connect, resonate and destroy each other: the direction of force is no longer one-dimensional. It comes to work two-dimensionally, three-dimensionally. - N = 2: an angle between; two vectors form a plane. Force acting in 2D. - N = 3: a space between; three vectors form a space. Force acting in 3D. - N >= 4: if the vectors exist in k dimensions, N vectors form min(k, n) dimensions. Force acting in N dimensions. Visually: going from 2D to 3D is already hard; how would I show higher dimensions? Force: it has to touch the self-field. The city-field: the form in which this force acts. How will I make this force work? Map-force. Mobile interaction. Deleuze again! Bacon! Hand and touch (the best tool is the finger: Steve Jobs). The hand is truly our instrument. And that instrument touches the mobile. Immanent forces. Intensities... formless, sobbing forms. Fluid changes of place. The city-field. Differential forces. The crossing of forces. And as forces cross like this, the city becomes a living, breathing being. Affirming rhythm (the rhythm of interaction). Techniques for designing automated systems A higher-level understanding of happiness is needed. The city-ecosystem: I must start from the fundamentals. Where are emergence and complexity formed? Individual elements: city lights, subways going back and forth (MTDBRI). The moment generating complexity becomes the goal, it fails. The generation of complexity has to be a result. The sum of well-established, intuitive, simple rules (differential equations) acts individually on individual factors (agents) (each with a different periodicity, a different waviness), and as a whole stages urban complexity. Where is waviness extracted from? Isn't a wave defined as the solution of the wave equation (the wave partial differential equation)? In the end, the city appears as the result of a system, the sum of higher-order differential equations (individual factors). The whole system: the cumulative F. It is f' and f'' that determine it (not F itself). So in the end what I have to do: not find the solution ("x"), but design the differential equation (dx/dt = F(x)) in which the solution ("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 the solution can exist. (A Deleuzian / Leibnizian / Jang Yongsoon-style reading.) Continuity of interaction Finger-skating? What is instrumental interaction? The mobile must act as a differential field of force that controls the virtual, the will to power. This differential force changes surface relations. So it is right that surface signs (Xi, etc.) appear on other screens. The mobile is the underlying force, keywords such as "happiness". Desire keywords → but this desire works in one direction only. The mobile should show only relations of force, the increase and decrease of force. Contemporary architecture is expected to become more sensitive to "rates of change", an architecture standing shoulder to shoulder with calculus. In particular, MVRDV's work derives the shape of buildings from huge amounts of data and the changes in that data. The diagram is a differential equation, and making a building from a diagram is solving the differential equation. (Map / mobile) is the differential equation, and (city collage / screen) is solving the differential equation. The result of a differential equation: two or more solutions. The uncertainty principle, a state of continual flux and floating. If architecture and philosophy understood differential equations in a superficial, metaphorical, conceptual way, MDWA must be understood as directly designing the differential equation, a process in which the interacting audiences solve it directly themselves. So the final destination of the city-spectacle I want to make: Times Square. In the end, urban complexity, emergence, is the final destination. A living, breathing city. The stability of the structure of "3" Fashion goes round and round. Made from combinations of the sign "3"... Circulation between goods, or between signs. Happiness, logos, signs: all similar principles. The circulation of signs. The circulation among three signs: how beautiful. How fluid. Combinations of signs on the mobile. The surface structure of happiness-hope-future. A three-term sign structure (like A/C/G/T). The orders of a differential equation: f' → f'' → f''' → f''''. The mobiles, the tiers of each device (hierarchy): each order, each level, corresponds to one derivative. Several mobiles: each takes partial derivatives in its own way, along its own gradient (partial derivative). Three signs, three terms: if the combinations of three signs and terms are differentiated again and again → couldn't they appear as three, endlessly? Just as sinh x and cosh x give f'' = f after two derivatives, and sin x and cos x give f'''' = f after four, similarly: f''' = f f = e^x + e^(-x/2)(cos(sqrt(3)/2 x) + sin(sqrt(3)/2 x)) f'''(x, y, z) = f(x, y, z)? How fashions go round. The apartment as a scarce good. Banpo Xi. The apartment's design and its way of running the community, too. On the surface it looks like a structure of ascent, ever improving (better design, better community). In substance it stays in place. Because competition is driven by "difference", consuming that difference: the upper class, the force creating difference; the middle class, the force trying to close it (minimal marginal difference). Consumption / Banpo-Xism is the minimal-marginal-difference consumption of the object of dwelling. Ways of representing the apartment What gets stacked doesn't have to be an APT. Other symbols of happiness, symbols of scarcity, can repeat endlessly. What matters is not the object of the stacking (Banpo Xi) but the form of the stacking (apartment-like: the terrible beauty of modern society, the endless repetition of car parks, of Nemo-ui kkum, the "dream of squares"), which itself points to the apartment. This oblique way criticises the APT all the more. - Option 1: show the apartment itself symbolically. - Option 2: rather than the apartment, other oblique symbols of happiness... which overload and stack until they look like an apartment. Semiotics (from lecture materials for a course on the aesthetics of the plastic arts) Concepts, entities, signs. Concepts → entities: represent. Signs → entities: denote. Signs → concepts: identify. A sign (representamen) is something that stands for something else under a certain relation. The three elements of the sign: the sign (representamen), the object, the interpretant (the content interpreted as the sign's meaning). The sign process, semiotics: it occurs when one grasps that a sign indicates an object. The interpretant in turn becomes a second sign and generates a second interpretant of the object; the second interpretant becomes a third sign and generates a third interpretant of the object; the third interpretant becomes a fourth sign and generates a fourth interpretant of the object... sign → object: interpretant = second sign → object: interpretant = third sign → object: interpretant A process of chained differentiation. The process of chained differentiation: f → f' → f'' → f'''. Differentially, topologically, virtually (the sign-interpretant chain at work). The process by which forces operate; the skin. Destroying the stable sign structure Destroy the reductionist Banpo-Xism and happiness structure. Important: in a popular way. Chance without a code. Resisting the code system. Contingency that dismantles the code system. Dismantling the system in which the signifier-signified relation is fixed and unchanging, especially the system that reinforces and fixes the signifier (Banpo-Xism). The living city The example of Times Square: realising a city alive and breathing, alive and moving. The billboards keep turning, keep playing, showing all kinds of images. The city fragments must do the same. There has to be constant changing of places, topological change... The whole urban space must be alive. It must be alive and moving about, evolving by itself (the domain of the solution) according to its own particular physical laws (differential equations), according to the sum of physical laws (the expression of the solution). That is the vitalist city, the alive, breathing, moving complex-system city: Times Square. Each billboard in Times Square is also bound to particular rules (commercial logic, the rule of advertising staging: equations, flows of force), but isn't it all of them together that make one emergent spectacle? Mobile: instrument The mobile is an instrument. f - f' - f'' - f''': differential relations. Or entirely opposed terms (a PDE, each partial parameter or variable: a collision of fields?). Like a MIDI controller: the mobile is the simplest of instruments. And N people, N instruments: each explores something different. A different config set for the ensemble. This config, these different things, the three terms sometimes diverge from each other, sometimes oppose each other, sometimes relate to each other, and the continuous development, destruction, rise and fall of the city that these three terms make together (the solution of the differential equation, the operation of forces) makes a living, breathing flow of city fragments, a tense flow that never stands still and keeps making rhythm and evolving. Each individual mobile works as one city-field. It resembles the many subjects who live in a city. The path by which a sum of rationalities makes irrationality, by which each one's individual effort, optimisation and rationalisation achieves irrationality and emergence at the scale of the vast crowd, the whole city: not simple wave functions of the same phase, but different wave functions superposed to build up a Fourier. Map collage Tourist maps, Naver Map, satellite maps, real-estate maps... Filling tiles. If you want to draw a map, you must not draw the map. Exploring the lines and connections beneath it is the key. A map is in the end lines, relations, flows (relations, fields, differential effects). The lesson of Ryoji Ikeda: when drawing a city, don't draw it with "surfaces". Fill it with the derivative of surfaces, lines (pathways), or the derivative of lines, points! Mobile: grid Grid: start from a blank canvas. City field: a city-field, a space where a physical field can be built. An extremely, terribly Cartesian space. And when the values "happiness", "hope" and "future" fill it, reductive competition executes. Just the abstract field itself! The minimalist lineage: Donald Judd, Dan Flavin? Symbol. Rotate, pin, zoom (navigation) → then this navigation affects the output. The mobile is both an instrument and a score... everyone holds a different score. --- 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.