# 반포 X 자이 = 100점

Canonical URL: https://jeanyoon.ch/oi/texts/banpo-xism-artist-notes-2025-11-21
Type: essay / research note
Author: Jeanyoon Choi (최정윤)
Date: 2025-11-21

## Full text

[A passage on Deleuze, transcribed from a book, in close paraphrase:] If we find ourselves thinking, "Huh? It seems the same pattern keeps repeating", that already means we have been captured by some sameness. To be serialised is, in other words, to be captured and caught. To distinguish types is to place something in a frame, from a subjective viewpoint, by some criterion of consciousness. In everyday life we are usually, unconsciously, tamed into "types". We look at things through a frame hardened by someone's intention or desire and readily agree with what has been typified. Then we have been captured and caught by the view of the person who set or defined that frame; our own thinking can be said to be dominated by theirs. That is, we have entered the stage of capture in which we take on sameness. When something different appears at that stage (foreign bodies! rebelling against the order of the series), we begin to perceive difference. So perceiving difference is cognition at work.

Why are the concepts of difference and repetition so important in Deleuze's thought? Instead of subject and object, he thought that seemingly quite different things, becoming and event, are "being". Then where, in Deleuze's thought, did I, the subject, and other people go? He saw this through the concepts of difference and repetition...

The same rule: the one absolute axis, the absolute rule (the absolute good, the absolute right answer, serialisation: sang-geupji and ha-geupji, higher-tier and lower-tier neighbourhoods).
- Finding the right answer.
- Finding the high score (100 points).
- Banpo x Xi = 100 points; everything else lies below 100.

Draft artwork statement

Banpo-Xism is an interactive web artwork that systemically dismantles and reconstructs the flat structure of desire that rules Korean society, so-called "Banpo-Xism". The artist focuses on how the lives of contemporary Koreans are reduced to the product of the location sign "Banpo" and the brand sign "Xi", that is, to coordinates on a two-dimensional plane of "location x brand".

This two-dimensional plane resembles the world of Flatland, the Victorian mathematical novel of the nineteenth century. Individual desires and life goals, castrated within a vector space, race only towards "up and to the right" within a hierarchy. But seen from a higher dimension, the struggle on this plane is nothing but the zero-sum game of "a frog in a well", a blind race that cannot see the real.

Through a multi-device web environment, the work cracks this flattened two-dimensional world. The visitor's mobile device functions as a "slot machine of meaning", and through scroll interaction the visitor dismantles rigid signs. These microscopic disturbances of signs change the cityscape on the large screens. Through the visitors' intervention, the uniform apartment grid is distorted into unpredictable shapes, set floating, and evolves into a higher-dimensional complex system beyond two dimensions. In the end, Banpo-Xism resists the "vectorisation of the human" represented by the real-estate class chart, and, with a post-structuralist character, invites us to think about a higher-dimensional future and shape of the city.

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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.