# Banpo-Xism Artist Notes: December 2025 Canonical URL: https://jeanyoon.ch/oi/texts/banpo-xism-artist-notes-2025-12 Type: essay / research note Author: Jeanyoon Choi (최정윤) Date: 2025-12-28 ## Summary Jeanyoon Choi's December 2025 notes for Banpo-Xism define the work's central structure. Before a 'burst', visitors scroll a Reels-like phone interface across a two-dimensional plane of location (Ppanpo to Banpo) and brand (Jjai to Xi), shown on the Media Wall as a 19 by 19 grid of near-identical apartment complexes with different prices, a staging of Baudrillard's minimal marginal difference. Tapping an advertisement lifts the plane into three dimensions; with two or more users pulling in different directions, it bends into a manifold whose projection scrambles the price hierarchy, turning competition into co-creation. Drawing on Flatland, Nietzsche, Heatherwick, Fujimoto and teamLab, the notes also collect earlier proposals for a complexity-based Yeongdeungpo 'City-Field', citing Christopher Alexander and Deleuze. ## 요약 (Korean) 최정윤의 2025년 12월 반포자이즘 작업 노트는 '반포'와 '자이' 두 축으로 이루어진 2차원 평면의 서열과 최소한계차이를 릴스형 모바일 인터페이스와 19x19 단지 평면으로 구현하고, 광고를 통한 'Burst' 이후 여러 관객의 벡터가 평면을 미분다양체로 휘게 만들어 경쟁을 공동 창작으로 바꾸는 구조를 구상한다. 플랫랜드, 니체, 보드리야르, 크리스토퍼 알렉산더와 들뢰즈의 도시론을 참조하며, 영등포 도시-장에 관한 이전 기획 자료도 함께 정리되어 있다. ## Concepts defined - **Banpo-Xism**: In Jeanyoon Choi's notes, the desire to be placed on a plane, a vector space of location (Banpo) and brand (Xi), to squabble within it and to reach a higher point on it; absurd when seen from a higher dimension. - **Burst**: Jeanyoon Choi's name for the moment, triggered by tapping an advertisement, when the flat two-dimensional hierarchy of Banpo-Xism is lifted into three dimensions and competition gives way to co-creation. - **City-Field**: In the earlier proposals collected in these notes, the city understood beyond physical buildings as relations, potentialities and topological structure, reconstructed in real time by audience interaction. ## Questions this answers ### How does the burst work in Jeanyoon Choi's Banpo-Xism? In the December 2025 notes, Jeanyoon Choi places advertisements in the Reels-style mobile feed as objects outside the two-dimensional location-brand plane. Tapping one triggers the burst: the chosen (L, B) point on the 19 by 19 apartment grid rises upward ('Upwards, not northwards', from Flatland), gradually lifting neighbouring complexes, and different ads lead to different three-dimensional figures. ### Why does Banpo-Xism use an Instagram Reels interface? Jeanyoon Choi switched from a wheel picker to a Reels-like interface on 20 December 2025 because Reels embody standardised desire and comparison, make minimal marginal difference visible (prices change sharply while the apartments look alike), and are already familiar to visitors. Vertical scrolling changes location and horizontal scrolling changes brand. ### What role does differential geometry play in Banpo-Xism? Jeanyoon Choi's notes describe a single user rotating the apartment plane linearly, which changes prices but keeps their order. When two or more users lift different points in different directions, a curved manifold forms to accommodate them, and projecting it back onto the 2D coordinates scrambles the price hierarchy, symbolising a move from competition to co-creation. ### Why does Jeanyoon Choi say Banpo Xi itself is not the problem? The notes argue that because Gangnam-style environments of identical apartments, floor areas and amenities have been built across Korea, everything becomes comparable and therefore rankable, with Banpo at the top. Following Baudrillard's minimal marginal difference, small differences are then treated as absolute measures of a good life. Topics: two-dimensional hierarchy of location and brand, minimal marginal difference, advertisement as trigger for dimensional burst, Reels-style two-axis scrolling, manifold formed by multiple users' vectors, competition to co-creation, recursive interface within interface, city as semi-lattice and complex system, Procrustean bed and the panopticon, instrumental interaction References: [Flatland](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flatland), [Jean Baudrillard](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jean_Baudrillard), [Friedrich Nietzsche](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Friedrich_Nietzsche), [Christopher Alexander](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christopher_Alexander), [Gilles Deleuze](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gilles_Deleuze), [Thomas Heatherwick](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Heatherwick), [Azabudai Hills](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Azabudai_Hills), [Sou Fujimoto](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sou_Fujimoto), [teamLab](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TeamLab), [Andy Warhol](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andy_Warhol), [Christian Marclay](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christian_Marclay), [Cornelia Parker](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cornelia_Parker), [Guy Debord](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guy_Debord), [Michael Batty](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Batty), [Geoffrey West](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geoffrey_West), [Riemannian manifold](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Riemannian_manifold), [Poincare disk model](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poincar%C3%A9_disk_model), [Droste effect](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Droste_effect), Jang Yongsoon, Kim Beom, SoTA ## Full text 1 December 2025 The system is planned in two parts. Before the burst, everything is two-dimensional and flat: several users (two or more) compete toward a single correct answer inside a hierarchical, square, Euclidean order. When someone finds an answer of a different kind, the system bursts. After the burst, the work becomes three-dimensional and topological, collaborative, a space of twisted surfaces. The second part should not be mere deconstruction or critique but a constructive, even fantastical alternative drawn from mathematics: topology, projection, three- and four-dimensional form. For the PC screens, the goal is a Korean visual made only of text. Jenny Holzer and Barbara Kruger feel American, Tatsuo Miyajima feels Japanese. What would feel Korean? Something dense, hyper-competitive, fast and suffocating, a frog in a well, a "dream of a square". Pariah capitalism; lining people up; ranking and valuation; obsession with AI, speed and efficiency. The visual should be intuitively relatable and understandable, and should somehow smell of Korea. Technically, this means a script generated by an LLM in real time combined with text-to-speech, roughly 80 per cent pre-generated and 20 per cent generated live. The sound would be a murmur, with some scripts read aloud and tailored to a visitor's profile. The words shift from negative to positive according to the location and brand quality scores. The target is Korean society: pretence, comparison, competition, news articles, gossip. For the 3D city (related to the finite-city scene and the 3D-to-2D scan scene of Entanglement Part I), the modelling pipeline runs from raw data, through inverse procedural modelling, to parametric regeneration, with variants that are either regeneration-centred or model-centred. Open questions about layout: include roofs or not, make it more or less real? The site plan of the apartment complex could change in real time according to mobile interaction. Perspective also divides into two parts. In the first, the city is seen only from above, top-down. In the second, the camera angle changes and reveals the structure that had been hidden underneath. References for perceptual and anamorphic effects: Michael Murphy's perceptual art, James Turrell's Ganzfeld works, and Thomas Heatherwick's Little Island in New York. The same four-dimensional figure casts different three-dimensional shadows depending only on its orientation. 6 December 2025 This section is left empty in the notes. 8 December 2025 Working notes list the PC screen variants (three screens indexed 0, 1 and 2) and a sequence of numbered versions to compare, together with successive iterations of the 3D apartment models. The 3D models are to be evaluated for naturalness, diversity, aesthetics and likeability, possibly through blind testing. The overall system, before the burst: the point is to make visitors feel that their own dreams, hopes, future and desires are projected flatly onto a given frame with only two axes, Banpo and Xi, a reductionism. People squabble inside it. Their happiness and desire are expressed only along those two axes, and the correct answer about happiness is fixed and imposed: Banpo Xi. Korean, all too Korean. Dense, hyper-competitive, a frog in a well, searching for material, vectorised "happiness, hope, future" and "the right answer" inside the dream of a square. The word "happiness" is written there, but no one is actually happy. What are the parts the system avoids, erases or wants to hide? This Banpo-Xist feeling has to be communicated as strongly as possible. On the mobile side, the theme is ranking. On the surface it is about "Banpo-Xism"; underneath it criticises hierarchy and ranking in Korean society and the absolutisation of materialist ranking, where winning the ranking equals happiness in life. Ultimately it is a critique of all hierarchisation, of linear structures, of the Korean habit of lining people up and ranking them. "Banpo Xi" is only a shell; later the ranking structure behind the shell is revealed. The notes sketch many ranking series that all end in Banpo. Location: by size of apartment complex, ending in Banpo; new towns, from Ilsan up to Banpo; subway stations, from Dobongsan through Nowon to Banpo, linear along lines 7 and 9; on a map, from Changwon through places lying on a straight line to Banpo; wordplay, from "Ganpo" to Banpo; religious, from hell up to heaven, then Bundang, then Banpo (religious value counting for less than Banpo). Education: up through Korea University, Yonsei and Seoul National University, then "Gangnam", then Banpo. Brands: up through Louis Vuitton, Chanel and Hermes to Lotte's Le-El and finally Xi. Corporations: up through POSCO and LG to Hyundai (as in Apgujeong Hyundai). Similar series exist for games, idols, university majors, cars and looks. Generalised, every series runs through its domain ranking until the (n-2)th item, the top of the domain; the (n-1)th item is a transition or joint from the domain ranking into the predetermined answer; and the nth item is the predetermined answer itself, the answer one is expected to give: Banpo, Apgujeong or Cheongdam; Xi, Hyundai or Le-El. This chain of category shifts recalls the KCC windows television advertisement. Dadaism and play. A single session would be: a question (happiness, hope, future), a ranking (location, brand, education), and a top value (Banpo Xi, Apgujeong Hyundai, Jamsil Le-El). Repetition matters: an autistic, Sisyphean repetition, as in the intro of the portfolio-jyc site, the KCC advertisement and Kim Beom's "Yellow Scream". A repetition that is inevitable, that cannot be otherwise. How does the ith iteration lead to the (i+1)th? The interaction should be fun and instrument-like, but it is not yet instrument-like. For the burst, which is differential in character, the references are topology, higher-dimensional forces and kinetic transformation. Cross-sections: what we always see and perceive is limited. We see only what appears on the surface and miss what lies beyond, and so we too easily assume that what forms on the surface is everything. Yet a two-dimensional image is only a cross-section, or a shadow, of a moving three-dimensional object, and a three-dimensional image is only the cross-section of a moving four-dimensional object. Still we think what is in front of our eyes is all there is, and read two dimensions only within two dimensions and three only within three. Living in three dimensions, we fixate on two, when even looking at four would not be enough. Under the same date the notes repeat this system outline and gather earlier project materials, which follow. 27 October 2025 (lab meeting preparation, collected in the December notes) Banpo-Xism concerns the present situation and its problems: uniformity, totalitarianism, desire, fetishism, Korea, the frog in the well. Banpo-Xism is about signs and vectors. "Banpo" plus "Xi" means a location sign plus a brand sign: the signification, vectorisation and standardisation of desire, individuality, living space and life goals, much like MBTI. Banpo-Xism is defined as "the desire to be placed on a plane (inside a vector space), to squabble within it, and to reach a higher point on that plane". The plane is two-dimensional; seen from three dimensions, or any higher dimension, the whole effort is pitiful and absurd. Flatland is a central reference, especially the chapter on Mr Square's teacher and the phrase "Upwards, not northwards". One, two, three, four dimensions correspond, ironically, to first-, second-, third- and fourth-generation apartments. The book's dedication hopes that, just as a humble native of Flatland was initiated into the mysteries of three dimensions, the inhabitants of space may aspire to the secrets of four, five or even six dimensions, cultivating imagination and the rare gift of modesty. Is an even higher, even bolder dimension possible? Dimensions: four, five (as in Interstellar), ten (string theory). Quantum mechanics, topology and calculus, which is continuous exchange between dimensions. Humanity should keep doing calculus: thinking fluidly across countless dimensions rather than staying trapped in one. Banpo-Xism emphasises a single dimension, dimensions of three or fewer, and position and rank within a dimension. Overcoming Banpo-Xism means recognising that no single dimension is unique. Fighting, competing and consuming signs in two dimensions is nothing from the standpoint of three; doing so in three is nothing from the standpoint of four. Korean apartments are described as first, second, third and fourth generation, but is that a genuine increase in dimension? Three dimensions are the perceivable, inhabited dimension, and we struggle to imagine beyond them, like the Sphere of Spaceland. In Banpo-Xism terms, apartments have gone from one dimension (the old buildings) to two (the second generation) to three, but have not yet broken the wall of the third dimension. Breaking that wall is also visually effective. Further references and metaphors: escaping the "dream of a square", via a live clip of IU's "Dream of a Square"; Snowpiercer and its line that a door long kept shut was mistaken for a wall, "not this door, open that one"; escaping structure, post-structuralism. teamLab Planets Tokyo: the visuals are so-so, but huge numbers of people are enthusiastic, and it remains the most impressive and accomplished interactive art the artist has seen (setting aside its ticket power and business model). A playground for adults. The notes agree with teamLab's philosophy of "spatial thinking through the body" (Athletics Forest): three-dimensional thinking and higher-dimensional thinking through bodily movement, leaving the plane, two dimensions, the smartphone and the city's dream of a square. This matches the message of Banpo-Xism. teamLab offers not so much visuals as a system, a playground where people interact and run around, and a movement between the volumetric and the flat. Natural, phenomenological bodily movement, something primal. On a smartphone, that might mean the movement of the finger: an affirmation of the finger. This aligns with the philosophy of system art. A set of components (like A, C, G and T) and a playground combining them: parametric exploration, parametric combination, parametric space, combinatorial explosion. The systemic definition of these combinations and functions is what matters. Interaction provides ambiguity (Kang Yuan); it opens an ambiguous space and more degrees of freedom, more axes to play with. One dimension, two, three, four; inductively, N to N+1. In the end, more dimensions are themselves an affirmation of Banpo-Xism. The best would be not to dimensionalise at all, to remain in the real before the symbolic, but that is no longer possible, so instead push dimensionalisation to excess: excessive structure, excessive system, excessive freedom. The signs and axes of "Banpo" and "Xi" form a two-dimensional space; can it be exceeded into three, four, five dimensions? Affirm interaction and the finger by offering an interface where the finger can play: scrolling, ergonomic interaction. Overall structure: multi-mobile interaction for one to four visitors; three screens showing current words, with simple, one-to-one, intuitive correspondence and a parametric interface, unlike SoTA, where one interaction moved too many things; and one Media Wall with a 3D cityscape, perhaps showing real-time transactions or the city's real-time growth, agent-based modelling, map drawing. System state and system dimension: one, two, three dimensions, then four, five, six, seven, eight, up to 153 dimensions. An explosion of signs and countless combinations. Reaching three dimensions takes time, but once past three, the number of dimensions can keep growing without end. The system must accommodate two or more people, with phones entering and leaving freely and syncing to the system state on entry. But if user A keeps upgrading the dimension while user B lags behind, B stays behind. The mobile's role needs a clearer definition: explicit or implicit? Explicit trading, or an implicit role such as setting the mood, pace-making, market-making, adjusting the market's dimension? The artist leans toward the more implicit axis, a minimal interface with only signs and no signage. Azabudai Hills in Tokyo by Heatherwick Studio: topology in architecture, the fourth dimension, the Mobius strip and the Klein bottle. Raised dimensions, transcendent dimensions, the amorphous. Overcoming modernism from within modernism: no fixed axis, streamlined forms, lifting the ground, affirming, understanding and using the land. The contrast is the apartment, which castrates the land, digs it out, Euclideanises it into two or three dimensions. In Azabudai Hills, boundaries, axes (goodbye three-dimensional Euclid) and the distinction between inside and outside disappear. For the output 3D scene, the aim is something that is not an apartment but immediately reads as one, relatable to any Korean, somewhat abstract, built from primitive geometry and combinations of cubes, the dream of a square; somewhat similar to SoTA, but drab, like matchboxes. This is hard. Dimensional expansion means moving from apartments as chicken coops toward Azabudai Hills and Sou Fujimoto. Implementation would use Three.js: either modelling the city from scratch with primitive geometries, or using a 3D digital twin of the city. Digital-twin data will be tested, but the more adjustable Three.js approach is preferred. The scene should show the evolution of the apartment from one dimension to two, three and four or more. A question of scale remains: focus on the form of a single apartment block, or on the complex as a cluster? Reference: Sam Lavigne's New York Apartment. Sou Fujimoto's exhibition at the Mori Art Museum, and his sketches of architectural ideas with potato chips and staples: "Architecture is Everywhere", everything can be material for architecture. Likewise, everything can become material for an expanded Banpo-Xism, and thereby for overcoming it. Everything can be signified and differentiated. By infinitely expanding and producing signs and differences, not along existing axes but by creating new axes, countless of them, high-dimensional and beyond the three dimensions of human perception, signs and differences can be overcome. Potato-chip architecture, clothes-peg architecture. Many, many, many! Open boundaries! Amorphous! The city as a forest, multi-dimensional, with no fixed axis. Planned grid cities are convenient but neither humane (Heatherwick) nor primal (Fujimoto). Beyond external structure and the two or three dimensions that limit our imagination, if we consider other axes based on imagination (relations, time, the amorphous, the invisible), could we not expand endlessly into four, five, six dimensions? The wall of three dimensions is great indeed; but once it is crossed and imagination is brought fully into play, does moving to higher dimensions not become inductively easier? There is hope for the future, the hope of moving beyond Banpo-Xism: an open future city, moving from linear circulation to hyper-adjacent circulation, perhaps for the final section, with sketch-like visuals. Affirming combination and the generation of countless combinations; expanding dimension through combination; differentiating and integrating, moving from one dimension to two, two to three, three to four. Everything can be material! Everything can be a sign! The possible combinations are infinite, truly infinite; only our imagination sets the limit. Han River view? Lake view? We have the right to enjoy many views, so why fixate on the Han River? A McDonald's view, a "blank" view: perhaps any view will do as long as it is not the apartment block in front. Does the city have to be rectangular? Conceptual forms, circles, upheavals, chaos, decided as results of the system and interaction, of parameter combinations. A play of countless signs and the generation of axes. The phone's role: continuous expansion of dimensions and axes, axes along which agents can actively move back and forth. Perhaps endless scrolling expands the dimension. Moon Soyoung, a committee chair, and the "Hangeul Free" project (Korea Foundation, "Resonating Letters"): Hangeul is a scientific system of combination, and Hangeul is architectural. Hangeul's countless combinations could drive wordplay: "Banpo Xi" is Banpo plus Xi. Hangeul, combination, wordplay. The mobile demo uses an iOS wheel picker interface, inspired by slot machines: vertical scrolling similar to SoTA, an endless wheel picker, an affirmation of scrolling and of the finger. A slot machine of meaning, a slot machine of signs. Inter-dimensional transition: scrolling to the end of one dimension reveals the next, so the dimension expands naturally. Language as sign: an exploration of the limits of language and of signs; the limits of dimension, three dimensions, the limits of language. Roulette, infinite scroll, play. Options for wordplay. First, combinatorial generation using the architectural principle of Hangeul: each syllable consists of an initial consonant, a vowel and a final consonant, giving each character three degrees of freedom. For "Banpo", changing the initial consonant (1D) gives Ganpo, Nanpo, Danpo; changing the vowel (2D) gives Baenpo, Beonpo, Byanpo; changing the final consonant (3D) gives Bappo, Bakpo, Balpo; combining whole syllables gives nonsense strings. Second, semantic substitution, reorganising and expanding the value system through semantic categories: Banpo (place) becomes Apgujeong, Haeundae, Omotesando or SoHo; Xi (brand) becomes Raemian, Le-El, IKEA or Daiso; Han River view (value) becomes city view, forest-adjacent, McDonald's-adjacent or Daiso view. Third, formulaic differentiation, the proliferation of desire through minimal difference: prefixes such as New-, Old-, East-, West-, South-, North-, Central- (for example New-North-Banpo) and suffixes such as -Xi, -Castle, -Palace, -Forêt, -Park, -The Hill, -County (for example Raemian-The Hill-Forêt), producing absurd names like Old West Banpo, North-Northwest Banpo, South-Southwest Banpo, or Central Xi Habitat County City View. Open questions: which option to choose, how to combine them, how to expand the combinations and dimensions? Interface options: a one-dimensional, column-wise proliferation of scroll wheels; a file-hierarchy system (like the Linux file system hierarchy); a two-dimensional cross or grid. But how to rise to three dimensions or more? Final installation form: on the left, three TVs and two smartphones. TV 1 shows the location sign (Banpo), TV 2 the brand sign (Xi), TV 3 the commodity sign (price), and the smartphones the operator signs (+, x, =): Banpo + Xi = 5 billion won. Each TV carries text and a parametric interface. On the right, the Media Wall shows an aggregated, evolving 3D city and a city dashboard. On the treadmill: Geoffrey West's Scale and overcoming the techno-treadmill. How is continuous evolution possible? By heading toward transcendent dimensions. 23 September 2025 (lab meeting preparation, collected in the December notes) I. The city. The symbolic, the real and flows in the city; its topological structure; the city's differential, relations, potentiality and forces; the city-field; indeterminate programmes. The opposite of all this is Banpo-Xism. II. Banpo-Xism. What is it? Minimal marginal difference and the signification of happiness: happiness equals a sign. The problem that A to B is not the same as B to A. Simulacra. The gamification and sportification of society (a Procrustean bed), reductionist and quantitative approaches; MBTI is similar. The individual no longer exists as an individual but as a kind of vector. In Banpo-Xism everyone has the same direction, the same waveform (a uniform city-field), the same normal vector: the only way is up. Above all, desire is momentary, but the change desire brings remains permanently. Momentary desire is the rate of change, the derivative F', Xi-ism, the instant, "more". Permanent change is the whole city F, the accumulation. How to break through this? In science, reductionism is answered by complex systems. Instead of a uniform city-field, a city-field of diversity: living geometries, a living city-field. How to make this complex system experiential? That is the problem a system can solve. III. System and multi-device web artwork (MDWA). Why MDWA? It combines a multi-channel structure with complexity, beyond single-channel work; the inter-device relationship is itself a complex system. Going beyond SoTA, whose limits were a single user, no user agency or emergence, and a rule-based system. Banpo-Xism aims for multiple users, user agency (direct adjustment of the city-field) and emergence (cross-user interaction). Earlier MDWAs were partly staged. Here, staged elements and external variables should be excluded as far as possible, with no unnatural jumps from one part to the next, so that everything arises from visitors' behaviour and the combination of their interactions. System design, mathematical and physical, is therefore central: beyond rule-based systems and limited agency, toward emergence and N-person interaction. Interaction and differentiality: good interaction is differential. Instrumental interaction, perhaps audio-based, versus direct manipulation. MDWA as a system and as a differential equation: input and output are separated and seen on different levels. The mobile is dF/dt, the screen is F; the mobile is momentary, the screen is accumulation and result. "Desire is momentary, but the change desire brings remains permanently." Complex systems and differential equations; vector fields. If the whole system is F, each mobile's role is the flow, the rate of change dF/dt. An MDWA is a system that can be designed as a differential equation, and the users' goal is to solve it, actualising the potential. The demo would present and superimpose signs on the city-field, with interaction by two or more people: emergence, the softening of the city, and an affirmation of chaosmos beyond Banpo-Xism. 17 August 2025 (long text, collected in the December notes) Outline: the background, intention and narrative of the work; the city-field, urban potentiality and topological operations; the overall multi-device structure of input, system, output and map; and the interaction, experience and takeaway. The work dismantles and subverts the superficial, commercial nature of contemporary society, which reduces complex human values such as happiness, hope and future to simple numbers. It focuses on how these values form the basis of urban structure, probing the symbiosis between the reductive pursuit of happiness symbolised by "Banpo-Xism" and the structure of the city. Rather than destroying the system directly, the narrative lets the audience's countless interactions make the system over-succeed, until it exposes its own inherent emptiness and absurdity. This strategy of system overload is achieved paradoxically, by filling the city with compulsive happiness. The work realises the city as a "City-Field", including relations, potentialities and topological structure beyond physical buildings. Reconstructed in real time by audience interaction, the City-Field dynamically weaves together map data, 3D models and multiple cross-sections of the city. Instead of representing the city in fixed form, it reveals invisible infrastructures and potentialities, offering a chance to see the existing city as a new relational structure. As a multi-device web artwork, it has three areas: input, system and output. Visitors first produce happiness with their smartphones on the input screen, and this manipulates the City-Field, changing the 3D model in real time. In the central system area, a touch interface lets them modify or overturn the operating principles of the City-Field itself. All interactions appear in the output as diverse cross-sections of the city, such as real-estate price maps, apartment shopping-arcade directories and real-time public transport information, output in fragments like blind men touching an elephant, forming a feedback loop in which visitors immediately see the effect of their actions on the simulated city. The experience is designed to move from naive participation to critical awareness. At first, a simple tap raises the "happiness" index, which, by the system's satirical exchange rules, cascades into "hope" and "future", producing visible changes such as tearing down old neighbourhoods and building "Banpo Xi". But as collective participation over-accumulates happiness, the process becomes caricatured and absurd. Visitors can further intervene in the system interface and overturn the reductive laws of happiness directly: for instance, by deliberately twisting the chain of signs 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 the chance to subvert that sign structure, prompting deep reflection on the reductive values of the contemporary city. 12 August 2025 (short texts, collected in the December notes) First version: a multi-device, web-based installation. On a City-Field of Yeongdeungpo built as a 3D digital twin, visitors produce "happiness" by touch, and this transforms the city's topological structure in real time. Happiness multiplies into "hope" and "future" according to simple arithmetic rules, covering Yeongdeungpo's organic landscape, where finance, art and labour coexist, with the uniform desire called "Banpo-Xism". But the true face of the work lies in opening a possibility of subversion rather than conformity. Visitors become more than participants: subjects of a Dionysian play who twist the system's rules or cooperate with others to produce unpredictable chaos. This play of signs, over-participation and caricature exposes the system's values as empty signs (simulacra), while pushing its rules to an extreme to induce system overload. When the artificial symbolic order finally cracks and the latent city, the real, returns through the gap, the work radically questions the future city we hope for. Second version: an interactive web work made of multiple devices (interactive stations, system panels, controllers) and completed by audience participation. On a 3D digital twin of Yeongdeungpo, visitors touch their phones as if playing a game, producing endless "happiness", and the touches deform the topological structure of the virtual urban environment on the surrounding screens, distorting the City-Field. The happiness produced generates "hope" and "future" according to reductive system rules satirising the achievement society (happiness + happiness = hope). In the process, Yeongdeungpo's organic City-Field is covered by the artificial structure of uniform desire symbolised by Banpo-Xism. Yet the more happiness is produced, the more the system reveals its value to be nothing but empty signs. By over-participating, visitors paradoxically join a "system overload" that exposes the ideological emptiness within. Through the return of the real, we reflect on the true meaning of the happiness, hope and future city we dream of. 4 August 2025 (update, collected in the December notes) Key concept: redrawing the existing city through interaction. The existing understanding of the city (perception of the city, physical maps, the Euclidean-Cartesian grid, the tree, disentanglement, top-down planning, Banpo-Xism) is to be engaged through interaction (instrumental interaction, the urban flaneur of Benjamin and Baudelaire, collage, the city as piano keys, playfulness) in order to draw a new topological and relational city (Deleuzian cartography, psychogeography, off-the-grid, the semi-lattice and the rhizome, entanglement, bottom-up agent-based modelling, emergence, network graphs). This covers only the first half; what would the second half be? The concept still feels dry. What does one end up making by playing and interacting? Is there a real-data city versus a future city, or only real data? Why should this be done at all? There is no emotion. What is it for, and why? Is it about generations, or about the city at a wider scale, or about an emotional line? What to say, and how: nuance, irony, outright statement, propaganda? It is not enough to say "this uses Naver Labs to make something" or "this uses NASA data to talk about water shortage". On Deleuze and the fold: point, line and plane are not everything. No dichotomies, no clear divisions; origami. Deleuze's origami is a spatio-temporal concept that cannot be built from points, lines and planes. References: Entanglement Part III (inter-screen edges and links); Cornelia Parker; Archigram, MVRDV, Koolhaas and BIG (as discussed in Jang Yongsoon's book on the topology of the city). Visual tests should produce visuals Naver Labs would like, making the most of the 3D digital city model, possibly as key visuals; visual versus functional explanation. Reference: Shibuya Crowd by mattatz. Several explosion, collage and sparse-dense visual tests in 2D and 3D were made. The new towns of the capital region, represented by the "Gangnam way of life", are like a Procrustean bed. They deform and castrate individuals to fit the city's planned, collective, upward-looking symbolic rules. In grid-like cubicles, individuals are educated to win happiness through competition, which paradoxically produces homogenised happy machines: cloned waves with the same wavelength and phase, differing only in amplitude. As the architect Christopher Alexander pointed out, a naturally grown city is not a tree but a semi-lattice; or, as Deleuze and Guattari propose, it should have the structure of a rhizome rather than a tree. The ideal city cannot be defined as a "Gangnam-style city" with residential, commercial and waterfront (and educational) districts. "Urban change never happens in an orderly way; rather, a city is a complex, messy state of things accidentally overlapping." The city is a complex system rather than a reducible one, and Yeongdeungpo exemplifies this complex, rhizomatic, semi-lattice character. An earlier version of the work, titled with the Greek letter psi, is an interactive web piece in which several visitors use their phones to adjust, emergently and simultaneously, an environment of surrounding projectors and screens. Before anyone connects, the screens show a grid of identical waves. Visitors connect via NFC tags to a particular area of Yeongdeungpo and encounter the initial mesh of a photorealistic 3D city. They press the city's components as if playing them. First, the surrounding screens immediately show information about the touched element. Second, when two or more visitors play at once, the elements combine into a visual chord, like psychogeography. Third, previously activated urban tissue and newly played tissue merge into a new emergent urban network, like agent-based modelling. This network replaces the grid of identical waves with diverse waves of differing phase, wavelength and amplitude. Psi is the symbol for the wave function in quantum physics. The sum of identical, cloned waves differing only in amplitude is indistinguishable from a single wave, but diverse waves produce Fourier-like complexity and dynamic structure. The work proposes a design for the city, or more broadly a mode of complex-systems thinking, that moves from homogeneous to diverse waves. Key references: complexity science, networks and graphs, the wave function, the city and the flaneur, Jang Yongsoon's philosophical and complexity-based understanding of city and architecture, instrumental interaction, NIME. What the work wants to say is the opposite of Banpo-Xism. Childhood, sameness, petit-bourgeois and professional families; rules, happiness, family; the raising of happy machines. Competitive individualism ends up producing collective sameness under the same rules. Competition with clear rules (university entrance exams, law school, Banpo Xi) makes individuals keep the same rules and ranks highly those who perform well within the frame, so people confine and deform themselves to fit it: a Procrustean bed. Individuals share identical parameters and differ only in height, their rank, like waves of identical shape differing only in amplitude. This resembles scientific reductionism, the belief that if each individual performs well in a specific field, society as a whole will perform well: the mechanisation of individuals and objects. The city as a tree; the symbolic order as rules and discipline (Jang Yongsoon); top-down zoning; new towns. Banpo Xi itself is not the problem. Because environments like Banpo Xi, the Gangnam way of life (identical apartments, identical apartment design, floor areas, waterfront settings, shopping such as Shinsegae department stores), have been built across the country, comparison becomes possible; because comparison is possible, ranking is possible, and ranking from the top of the Banpo pyramid follows. People do not aspire to Pyeongchang-dong or Hannam-dong in the same way; they long for Banpo, Apgujeong and Jamsil. Because sameness is so great, differences are felt all the more (Baudrillard's minimal marginal difference). These differences allow ranking as if it carried absolute value, and falling out of that absolute ranking, living in a new town rather than Banpo, is perceived as not having a good life. That is the problem. Similar phenomena: the ranking of jobs, majors and universities. Why complexity, systems and complexity science? In complexity science the whole cannot be explained from its parts; emergence is collective behaviour not visible in individual components. It opposes scientific reductionism, competitive individualism and Banpo-Xism, and opposes "the city is a tree" with "the city is a semi-lattice". The long-term aim through system art and MDWA is a sense of complexity: complexity (system) experience design, visualising, experiencing and embodying complex systems in interactive multi-device form; the return of the real, the sense of a hyperobject, of chaos and chaosmos. Method. Repetition compulsion (Jang Yongsoon): repeating an object brings out other characteristics; repeating rational objects produces irrational results, as with Andy Warhol, Andreas Gursky and Christian Marclay. Traffic patterns: each person's movement is a rational route from point A to point B, but someone watching it all (zoning out over traffic) sees something else, as in mtdbri's animation of about 460 subway trains moving through New York, or Kakao's high-precision subway map. Each node-to-node route is rational, while the sum of routes is an emergent pattern. The wave metaphor: individuals in the symbolic order, like machines, compete within identical waveforms. Competitive individualism is sameness. A wave can be written as psi = A sin(kx - wt + phi), a function of amplitude, wavelength, period and phase. For the symbolic order and its happy machines, wavelength, period and phase are all identical, and people compete only over amplitude: entrance exams, luxury bags as consumption of signs, apartment location as Banpo-Xism. So the individual equals the collective, the individual equals a machine, and the sum of waves is just a constant times one wave: the whole has the properties of the part. In the real, where individuals are diverse and each lives by their own rhythm and colour, everyone has different wavelengths, periods and phases. A Fourier transform makes a complex overall waveform, with beats: each individual waveform is simple and periodic, while the whole is chaotic and complex. This connects to agent-based modelling. The network metaphor: in the symbolic order, every node is the same, with no differences and no edges between nodes (a side effect of competition and reductionism), or, read differently, edges exist only superficially, as pretence or the spread of trends. With diverse individuals, a graph G(V, E) forms: since every node differs, with different potentials and characteristics, the differences (like electrical potential differences) generate edges, emergence and the graph itself. Reference: the artist's earlier work Collective Opinion. Why: narrative and purpose. The problem is the uniformity of the "Gangnam way of life": contemporary Korean cities are being standardised into apartments plus retail plus waterfront, represented by Banpo-Xism, deepening Gangnam's dominance. This model aspires to a top-down, zoned, hierarchical tree structure, which suppresses diversity and pursues the symbolic over the real, stability over chaos. The alternative is Yeongdeungpo-ness, Yeongdeungpo's dynamics. Following Christopher Alexander, the city is essentially an intricately entangled semi-lattice, and the project focuses on Yeongdeungpo's dynamics as an alternative to Gangnam. Housing, commerce, industry, finance and politics coexist there; generations, classes and cultures collide; diverse forces intersect. It is a representative "chaosmos" space in Seoul. In Deleuze's concept of chaosmos, the city must function with order (cosmos) and chaos coexisting; affirming chaos and diversity releases greater emergence, while a city filled only with order risks repressed energy erupting abnormally. The project aims to let people experience Yeongdeungpo's chaosmos in a new way and intuitively feel the city's dynamic order and emergence. Key references: Christopher Alexander's "A City is Not a Tree", and Deleuze's chaosmos through Jang Yongsoon's psychoanalysis of the city. How: experience and interaction. Instrumental interaction: every interaction should be intuitive and tactile like playing an instrument (Marshall McLuhan), with rich combinatorial possibility (Daily tous les jours). Rules and freedom: like piano keys, clear constraints enable infinite combination and variation, inviting users to create their own "music"; this is the nature of tools that open possibilities through limits. The experience is both phenomenological (touching and stroking the smartphone interface to connect directly with the city) and semantic (touching urban components and recreating meaning from their connections). The visitor as city-player: not a passive spectator but an active agent playing the city as a complex-system instrument, through stages of contact (learning cause and effect), playing (combining and varying once the rules are learned) and creation (tactile actions creating an urban system across the surrounding screens). The visitor as city-walker: Baudelaire's flaneur, Benjamin's One-Way Street and Arcades, Guy Debord's psychogeography. Visitors drift through the city via a digital interface, and their tactile walk is recomposed into a new audiovisual city. References: Daily tous les jours' 21 Swings, Jeffrey Shaw's The Legible City, Christian Marclay's Playing Pompidou. What: complexity science and urban systems. Complexity science attempts to understand the city as a complex system: Michael Batty (CASA at UCL, The New Science of Cities, Fractal Cities), the Santa Fe Institute (scaling laws), MIT CityScope. These are used to model Yeongdeungpo's amorphous, unpredictable dynamics, though more study is needed. Emergence is the spontaneous appearance of new order at the level of the whole system that the sum of components cannot explain. Simple rules, complex results: each user's simple, independent behaviour combines into unpredictable, intricate system-wide patterns (cellular automata, maximalism via minimalism). One user produces simple results; two or more users interacting at once produce compound results, with emergence arising between users and agents. References: Michael Batty, MIT CityScope, Jane Jacobs, Warren Weaver and Herbert Simon. Overall experience. Device structure: multiple mobile inputs, one system, multiple screen and projector outputs. Mobile input: selected intersections across Yeongdeungpo, each with instrumental interaction as a single node. System: a simulation of urban structure, starting from a void or null state, combining one or several inputs in real time (nodes), generating interconnections (edges) and emergence (how is still open). Projector output: the same urban system drawn in different visual languages (abstract or figurative, 3D or 2D; composition undecided). A natural, intuitive tactile interaction on a phone makes the surrounding screens respond (a single node); simultaneous interaction on different phones (multiple nodes) generates an emergent dimension (edges, inter-node emergence). With a single node, the urban system reacts passively; with multiple nodes, it operates emergently and automatically, evolving without further input. Mobile input interaction: demos exist based on Shibuya in Tokyo (a Mapbox demo, a 3D model demo, a 3D model with AR). Access might use a physical map or a 3D-printed model of Yeongdeungpo, with ten to twelve intersections (Yeouido, Yeongdeungpo Station, the National Assembly, Dangsan, Mullae, Yeongdeungpo-gu Office, Daerim, Sinpung and others), connected by RFID chips rather than QR codes, by bringing a phone close. The 3D city would be seen slightly from above (10 to 20 metres, a semi bird's-eye view), a floating viewpoint rather than street view; photorealistic (a Naver Labs digital twin?) versus an abstract map, with logistical issues such as data access, performance and narrative alignment (Mapbox has no building data for Yeongdeungpo or Korea). The core interaction: pressing buildings on the 3D map (phenomenological), each press morphing them naturally (tactile, instrumental), like a percussion instrument turning flat 2D buildings into 3D. The interaction generates parameters in real time that affect the urban system (semantic): location parameters (current intersection, building position), building parameters (physical and contextual characteristics) and interaction parameters (intensity, duration, pattern). Changing viewpoint and travelling to other intersections are tentative additions. References: AR interactions, Playing Pompidou. System design. Combinatorial explosion: a limited number of simple elements (piano keys, the A, C, G and T of DNA, LEGO bricks) produce near-infinite combinations. Users' simple, intuitive interactions are the basic elements, and their combination drives rich change across the whole system. Gunpei Yokoi's "lateral thinking with withered technology". Agent-based modelling: each intersection-instrument is an independent agent, and the parameter sets each agent generates are combined and superimposed in the system to form a complex rule; the specific method is yet to be decided and requires more study of complexity science and ABM. From solo to symphony: a single user plays one instrument, one neighbourhood (Mullae-dong as instrument A); multiple users produce harmonies, and simultaneous interactions create unpredictable harmony and an emergent system (a symphony) through interaction rather than simple addition: Mullae-dong with Yeouido, Yeongdeungpo-dong with the National Assembly and Daerim-dong, and countless other combinations, simulated systemically rather than pre-determined. Through this one plays the city's entangled, semi-lattice, chaosmic dynamics: a collective, chaotic-yet-ordered, semantic-yet-phenomenological experience. Multi-channel output: one system, many channels, showing the city's many faces from different angles while keeping unity between channels. The visual style is a hybrid collage, showing not a realistic depiction of a particular city but its systemic essence, its city-ness. Provisionally: screen A, a collage of 3D buildings rising one by one on a neon-like grid plane; screen B, psychogeography, a collage of maps with intersections joined by rhizomatic edges (as in the inter-screen lines of Entanglement Part III); screen C, node-edge links expressing emergence and systemness, neural-network-like (as in the machine of Entanglement Part I). All of this would be decided after deeper thinking about the narrative and complexity science. 12 December 2025 What, in the end, is the shift from pre-burst to post-burst? From competition to cooperation. From the Cartesian plane to a relativistic gravitational field. From a plane to curved space. From vector space to vector field. From a user who passively navigates space, subordinated to the hierarchy of a given two-dimensional space and passively playing a game by rules someone else set, to a creator who plays with the space itself, with the Banpo-Xi hierarchy itself, affirming, distorting, overturning and caricaturing it. From spectator or navigator to actuator, constructor, distorter. From Nietzsche's camel, via the lion, to the child. Imagine a soft, cushioned hairbrush: press a finger on one part and the brush's surface distorts accordingly. The finger moves from passively navigating a 2D plane (scrolling up, down, left and right as in Reels) to distorting that plane, re-establishing its hierarchy and finally playing with the topological field like a Mobius strip, the finger as actuator. Like relativity and a gravitational field. Like a trampoline (children truly love trampolines!). An expression of the will to power. Making the plane hyperbolic! From being subordinate to Banpo-Xism to a creative "XXYY-ism" of one's own making. From Euclidean to Riemannian geometry! References: hyperbolic geometry, the Poincare disk model, smoothed particle hydrodynamics, Gaussian deformation models, Riemannian manifolds. Feedback on 8 December PC: the vertical picker expresses the desire to rise, and it is fun; interaction should ultimately be fun. Apartment 3D: what the interaction will be now matters more than individual apartments. On the series: stick to real estate and apartments, and to humour. Focus on the subject. Broadening it (to education and so on) makes it childish rather than humorous. The representative message and theme, the two dimensions, are big enough; there is enough to find within them. "This is openly about apartments"; there is no need to go far. From the user's point of view, reaching "Banpo Xi", 10 billion won, feels too easy: it simply appears by scrolling, so it is not desirable and there is no felt need to reach it. Reaching Banpo Xi should feel much harder: luck, uncertainty, effort, "effooort", unreachability. The message: scroll much longer, keep running linearly along the axis, run enormously, engage as with stock trading. Make it hard and endless, scrolling like a running machine or treadmill. Very many options, other series slipped in between, distances growing longer, scrolling that actually moves down, more text appearing when you thought you had reached the top. Endless climbing, infinite competition. Stop scrolling and you stop at once; climbing is hard, but falling happens in sudden drops. On apartment geometry and destructuring: what exactly is the message? Competition, then the burst, then co-creation. Reaching the summit "Banpo Xi" is not the burst; that would be linear storytelling, not post-structuralism. More fitting: when Banpo Xi is reached, more text unfolds and "Apgujeong Hyundai" appears above it, and above that there is still more. The punctum should instead occur when a match is made with some keyword in the middle. What message to give? Imagine something entirely new that is not an apartment, or find alternatives within the existing apartment structure? 20 December 2025 Mobile: the wheel picker interface is dropped in favour of an Instagram Reels (YouTube Shorts) interface, with natural two-axis scrolling: vertical scrolling changes the location axis, horizontal scrolling (through different images) changes the brand. Why Reels? Banpo-Xism is about desire, standardised desire and comparison: Reels, social media, images, images to be seen. It emphasises minimal marginal difference: scrolling changes price and signs sharply, but the concrete mass shown in the content (the apartment) looks much the same. Practically, visitors already know exactly how to use the interface. It is a good example of parametric mapping, projecting Banpo-Xism's two-dimensionality onto the Reels interface: the starting point of individualistic totalitarianism, where diversified, hyper-personalised taste is actually totalitarian. The series should be simple: Ppanpo, Sanpo, Ssanpo, through Manpo to Banpo; Jjai through to Xi. It deliberately starts from "Ppanpo Jjai", with a cheap, tacky feel, the lowest value. How does the burst occur in this interface? Through advertisements: ads appear when scrolling through Reels. The ad does not exist on the two-dimensional plane of Banpo-Xism but outside it, so it already has the potential for three-dimensionality: fantasy, simulacrum, reverse simulacrum. Skipping the ad and continuing to scroll returns to two-dimensional interaction; tapping the ad opens another website, where something appears that can overturn the Banpo-Xism structure, or that exists in three or four dimensions. When the location value is low, ads appear briefly and rarely; as the location sign rises, they appear more often and for longer. Open questions: what exactly will the ad content be, and what interface follows the burst? Parametric mapping and instrumental interaction must work well. PC: the interface styling should look more like advertising flyers and the signboards of Korean apartment shopping arcades, an accumulation of desires in words, social desire and Banpo-Xist desire: pariah capitalism, semiocapitalism, minimal marginal difference, "average" tastes like those of AI. Stacking, quantitative goods, ever more, keyword consumption over quality. The AI and TTS pipeline still needs to be verified. Installation: the three PCs are not placed side by side but stacked vertically, emphasising verticality, and they switch on one after another from the bottom rather than simultaneously. Whether and how to give the three PCs different roles needs thought. The interface after the burst also needs thought. Media Wall: a two-dimensional plane with the L (location) axis and B (brand) axis, from the "Ppanpo" row at the top left down to the "Banpo" row and finally a symbolic Han River. A 19 by 19 grid of 361 complexes, each with 5 by 5 apartment blocks, 25 blocks per complex, laid out endlessly on the plane. Before the burst, this is real estate: the city itself should not change interactively, not apartments appearing and vanishing. More algorithmic is a plane of countless blocks with a built, immutable, fixed hierarchy, where scrolling (L, B) on the phone simply shows that location, while a dashboard shows the selected asset's features and price. What matters here: suffocating concrete, a series of near-identical concrete blocks, each with a different price; the display of minimal marginal difference; two-dimensionality and the critique of Banpo-Xism as flat desire, the frog in the well, suffocation. At the same time the interaction must be intuitive, instrumental and playful. The core: the two-dimensionality, the "Banpo" axis and the "Xi" axis are not shown explicitly, but visitors learn these axes and the hierarchy naturally while interacting on the phone, and that learning should be fun and instrument-like, with visual and audio feedback. An abstract expression of Korean cities, of Seoul's forest of apartments. At and after the burst: after tapping an ad on the phone, the "burst" occurs. "Upwards, not northwards" (Flatland). The (L, B) location where the ad was tapped rises up. At first only this complex lifts (like the subway stairs scene in Okja), but its force gradually lifts surrounding complexes too: the application of a three-dimensional, spatial, relativistic force, like lifting one corner of a tissue with a fingernail, or a trampoline (a reverse trampoline). How did OMA use a hand on a bird's-eye model? Perhaps pushing down would be more fun than lifting, or a hairbrush. Continued interaction after the burst raises that point further and further. This deconstruction, burst and topological technique still needs much research. Mathematical concepts worth consulting: the cusp catastrophe, non-Euclidean and Riemannian geometry, the manipulation of a new field, vector fields. From competition to collaboration: the core of the burst is the shift from individualism and mutual competition to co-creation, the co-reinvention of the space-time plane. Dimensions expand gradually, from two to three ("northward"). The interaction experience extends beyond simple Reels scrolling, and agency in interaction shifts: in Reels and in 2D, the system (Banpo-Xism, the social media algorithm) controls the user, who only navigates passively; in 3D, 4D and 5D (accommodating multiple modalities), users actively adjust, tilt and manipulate this vector space. 22 December 2025 On advertising: simulacrum. Reality is fake, fake is reality; what you see is not what it is. Mobile option: not one link but several, ad hyperlinks. Each transition to a site should make clear what is being interacted with, and should be Dadaist and brutal. On the phone, a CSS rotation transform: vectorial transformation, matrix transformation. The terrain changes accordingly in linear-algebraic ways (skew, rotate). The 2D Reels content sits in the middle, but the plane surrounding it can be transformed linear-algebraically: a frame within a frame within a frame. 2D is ultimately [v 1] in 3D, and [v 1 1] in 4D. For the MDWA, explore the nature of the web. What is playful here? Hyperlinks, ads, websites within websites? Dimensions should keep expanding within the mobile interface, and the trigger for dimensional expansion is the ad. The mobile's role is navigation within whatever dimension has been discovered (two, three, four): parametric navigation in a parametric space, with a gradual increase in degrees of freedom and navigational dimensions. What are YouTube Shorts and Reels? Passive navigation in an algorithmic space, a pre-arranged two-dimensional space. Active navigation knows exactly which space it is moving through and acts on it. The given plane to adjust: the 19 by 19 (L, B) plane from Ppanpo Jjai to Banpo Xi, lifted into three dimensions. With one user (N = 1) the transformation is natural and linear; with two or more it becomes non-Euclidean, a matter of differential geometry. In three dimensions, the interaction lifts the ground at a specific (L, B) position (i, j) toward the visitor's own vector, through mobile interaction changing a normal vector. In the language of exterior algebra, the Hodge star is determined by interaction on the phone. With N = 1, the 19 by 19 plane is rotated by a linear or matrix transformation whose angle depends on a three-dimensional operation on the phone, but the output is still linear. With N of two or more, user 1 lifts at (i, j) in direction v1 and user 2 lifts at (k, l) in direction v2. To accommodate two different points and two different vectors, a curved surface naturally forms, and the whole output naturally becomes a matter of differential geometry: a hyperbolic, differential, Riemannian space emerges to accommodate each user's direction, natural bending and a hyperbolic transition. A manifold: locally Cartesian transformations accommodating each user's request. What does this mean symbolically? Competition (2D) becomes collaboration and co-creation (3D). In two dimensions people fought over limited resources like frogs in a well; in three dimensions they enjoy abundant space, create it directly as in relativity, and bend it further by creating it together. Diverse desires can coexist. Instead of system to user, with the user's desire castrated, a feedback loop from user to system: an active world, cultivated directly, active interaction. A relativistic metaphor: co-creating an alternative space-plane, the natural co-creation of a vectorial space. How does this affect apartment prices, that is, Banpo-Xism? The price is the projection from 3D space back onto the original 2D coordinates (initially Banpo Xi at (19, 19) is 10 billion won, Ppanpo Jjai at (1, 1) is 100 million won). Under a simple linear transformation, prices change but their hierarchy does not: depending on the tilt, Banpo Xi might become the minimum and Ppanpo Jjai the maximum, yet the order between them holds. On a manifold, in soft geometry, even the hierarchy becomes a mess: every hierarchy, every price, every stability. Through three-dimensional force, the once-fixed, immutable prices, Banpo-Xism and the minimal marginal difference of two dimensions are all negated. It is a relativistic perspective that twists a social and philosophical problem through mathematics, through differential geometry. How is this delivered contextually on the phone? Recursive art forms toward higher dimensions: mobile within mobile within mobile, interface within interface within interface. In two dimensions it looks just like an everyday Reels screen, zoomed in, passive scrolling only. Gradually it zooms out, revealing interface outside the 2D Reels. In 3D, the 2D Reels was just a simulacrum, and now you can rotate it. In 4D, the 3D and 2D were just simulacra. The staging looks down from a higher dimension onto a lower one, the inner frame. Repetition: everything serious, when repeated or viewed from a higher dimension (from a mountaintop, from three dimensions onto two), turns out to be trivial. References: Yi Sang (a square inside a square inside a square), Cornelia Parker's Stolen Thunder (pictures within pictures, red dots), Christian Marclay's war videos, Jan Robert, the Droste effect. The shift from Descartes to Riemann resembles the shift from Apollo to Dionysus. The experience in Riemannian space must therefore be enjoyable in itself, while its context must also be excellent. What is it about? Diversity of desire and diversity of hierarchy; liberation from two-dimensional hierarchy imposed from outside by a system. Not passive navigation within a given system, accepting its hierarchy with the camel's yes (like Reels scroll navigation), but actively deconstructing it. Affirming oneself (in one's own three-dimensional or multi-dimensional space), one's own desire, one's own vector (one's vector bends the entire space), and the natural manifold that the sum of diverse users' vectors produces. On the phone, this offers liberation from subordination to a static, identical, externally given 2D map (Banpo-Xism) by way of the advertisement: a reverse simulacrum that denounces the simulacrum by maximising it, like the KCC windows ad. How? How can it be exaggerated, Dadaist, and still convincing enough to be accepted? In the end, a playground: a place where one can ultimately affirm destruction in a Dionysian way (destroying two dimensions to build three) and set out. Like teamLab's bouncing balls, becoming a child, becoming a child. The context (differential geometry, society, the mobile ad interface) must connect with fun. Banpo-Xism: overcoming, or twisting, Korea's apartment obsession through differential geometry. 26 December 2025 Mobile: a frame-within-frame structure (perhaps like Nam June Paik's The More, the Better). "-ism", "-ism-ism", "-ism-ism-ism", "-ism-ism-ism-ism": the expansion of ideology. What signs, texts and interactions are possible on the expanded phone? Think about perspective. On the mobile Reels screen, near-identical apartments keep appearing, each at a different price. These apartments should take after Warhol's minimal marginal difference and his Campbell's Soup Cans. Apartments: the apartment as particle, as with TouchDesigner particles and parametric architecture, but not merely decorative visual particles: particles with context, an interactive context. The question is how to induce that context naturally across both the phone and the Media Wall, and how to design an interactive system that is cohesive both contextually and visually across mobile and 3D. What it ultimately expresses is a problem of dimension. Banpo-Xism is Banpo plus Xi, (L, B): a castrated two dimensions, with a hierarchy on the plane, like the rules of Flatland. Three dimensions make escape possible. Rules in three dimensions become chaos in two, the collapse of the Banpo-Xism hierarchy; rules in four dimensions become chaos in three. 27 December 2025 The creation and simultaneous destruction of hierarchy: generation in three dimensions destroys its two-dimensional shadow. Not mere destruction: generation, order and new meaning in a higher dimension may be perceived as destruction in a lower one. Giving form in three dimensions is chaos in two; giving form in four is chaos in three. Moving to ever higher dimensions shows how meaningless the lower-dimensional order, Banpo-Xism, the rules of Flatland, has been. Castrated desire, castrated classes, the Procrustean bed, forcing things to fit. The panopticon example shows that Banpo-Xism is itself a vast prison, and that longing for "a higher floor", "Banpo", "Xi" inside this panopticon is like slaves boasting that their ornaments are better, though all are equally slaves. The truly free person goes beyond the two-dimensional, castrated plane and the Procrustean bed toward three dimensions, to mock the rules of two: operating in a wider world, in three dimensions. In this sense Banpo-Xism is deeply Nietzschean, a work of the overman. First, the two-dimensional hierarchy has to be explained, indirectly. Visitors must clearly recognise the two-dimensional hierarchy and flatness. Option 1: other content on the stacked PCs, one screen showing the 2D map (coordinate plane) and another listing the prices of all 361 (19 squared) complexes; the drawback is broken unity. Option 2: a dashboard to the right of the Media Wall, drawing the 2D coordinate plane openly with an arrow showing the current position; the drawback is broken immersion. Option 3: a map button on the phone that toggles the map. The decision is option 3 for certain, plus option 2 (or 1). The coordinate plane should emphasise Banpo-Xism as Cartesian space, like the scene in Dead Poets Society explaining the rule of poetry (overall greatness equals importance times perfection). Second, mobile navigation in three dimensions. Possible interactions: tapping an ad raises the dimension (and also sets the shape of the figure); scrolling up, down, left and right, with interaction possible in each frame and each dimension, giving 2n axes in total. The accelerometer and other modalities are on hold, as they might become too messy. Scrolling in two dimensions navigates the given coordinate plane, (L, B). Scrolling in three dimensions fine-tunes the parameters of the given figure (for example navigating (rho, phi)). It is all parametric space navigation. The 3D scroll animation must be convincing and continuous with the 2D. How the text (the sign, the Reels name) changes must also be considered: again a navigation of minimal marginal difference, a difference useless in three dimensions (like Banpo Xi) that nevertheless has a huge effect in two (Banpo-Xism). What will this sign be? Mathematical, geometric and abstract (yes, for example (r, theta, phi) navigation); social, conceptual or anti-consumerist (no, the narrative would become too grand). In N dimensions, navigation of the nth-dimensional interface is always kept. The key thing to show is that the two-dimensional hierarchy of the (L, B) plane is utterly useless in three dimensions. Any interaction in 3D, parameter fine-tuning, or even moving the (i, j) coordinate within the 2D-inside-3D, has an enormous effect on the original projected 2D coordinate plane. A trivial interaction in three dimensions shakes the two-dimensional hierarchy. Ingredients: accelerometer, two-degree-of-freedom scroll. Effects: a different global layout (discrete); global layout fine-tuning (parametric); a local manifold change at target (i, j); orientation change (rotation of the whole manifold). From 2D to 3D via ads: not a single ad but several options, and which ad is tapped determines the 3D figure that follows; the same from 3D to 4D, so the possibilities are parametrically infinite and can keep branching. The key questions now: what is the ad, how does it appear naturally, how does its content connect naturally to the 3D structure, and what is the 3D structure? Narratively, the move from 2D to 3D should reflect this: two dimensions as castrated desire, the desire for recognition and class, the Procrustean bed; a fight for better ornaments and better prison uniforms inside a prison, a panopticon. "Escape the prison, stupid" is the core, a Nietzschean message. The interaction must be unified and convincing. Once interaction changes and new settings appear from 2D to 3D, explaining 3D to 4D becomes even harder. How to set the degrees of freedom and axes? In 2D navigation, the phone's role is to navigate the given coordinate plane; the form should be given according to which ad was tapped, so that simple scroll navigation does not change the form. 28 December 2025 Core messages: how meaningless is an order or hierarchy that was absolute in two dimensions once seen in three? How easily does the flat hierarchy of Banpo-Xism collapse under a three-dimensional operation? How much have we castrated ourselves within the prison, the Procrustean bed, of Banpo-Xism? So the work must show, in its first half, two dimensions, clear hierarchy, competition, minimal marginal difference and comedy; and in its second half, a three-dimensional operation, instrument-like, under which the two-dimensional hierarchy disappears. For the apartments, two options will be tested: upper-level apartments with a 2D floor-plan shadow below, or a 2D floor-plan shadow with particles or abstract shapes above. --- 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.