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

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jeanyoon.ch@oi /oi % cat banpo-xism-artist-notes-2026-02

Banpo-Xism Artist Notes: February 2026

2026-02-28

22 February 2026

Avant-garde advertisement; ad-art. A chatbot conversation on the subject was consulted.

23 February 2026

Nam June Paik's TV magnet: what should one see in it? Free interaction, natural and unconstrained, making full use of the modality itself. A field and its physical laws: the magnetic field is adjusted, and in the same way the movement of a finger should bend Banpo-Xism according to physical law. A revolt against hierarchy, order and one-directionality: going beyond merely watching the one-way medium of television, or merely following Banpo-Xism, toward a counterpunch.

References: the KCC window advertisement in which the actor Seong Dong-il is trapped in an infinite advertising universe; Design Ah! and the Design Ah! Exhibition Neo 2025; Pollock, Rauschenberg and Bacon, as force and the Dionysian.

Two interpretations of integration: turning a parameter that had been fixed, assumed to be a constant (z = c), into a variable; and making continuous what had been discrete points (i, i+1, i+2).

28 February 2026

Banpo-Xism is a multi-device web artwork. Visitors join from their own phones through a QR code; the work must accommodate a single visitor as well as two, three or four at once. A large Media Wall is the main canvas, where the distortion of Banpo-Xism by interaction is shown most directly. Three vertical 55- or 65-inch displays sit beside it. All devices are installed in the same space, and parameters adjusted on the phones affect the Media Wall and the displays in real time.

The phone is the visitor's medium of interaction, with an interface like Instagram Explore. At first it only scrolls up and down in a low dimension. After an advertisement is clicked, it gradually enters higher dimensions, distorting Banpo-Xism and restructuring it there. This happens variably, divergently, combinatorially and as scenarios, following a rhizomatic structure of hyperlinks, so that two or more visitors can restructure the Media Wall simultaneously and differently through different modalities.

The Media Wall begins as a 19 by 19 plane: 361 apartment complexes on a two-dimensional Cartesian plane, each made of 5 by 5 buildings, giving a 95 by 95 field. Successive higher-dimensional interactions distort it structurally: at stage N = 3 it lifts along the y-axis, and afterwards it collapses into a higher-dimensional manifold.

The three displays supply context. PC 0 shows location and brand texts matching each phone user's location (Ppanpo to Banpo) and brand (Jjai to Xi); with several users, a tower is generated for each, densely filled with gossip texts reflecting the hierarchy of each location, as a contextual background. PC 1, a dashboard not yet developed, would show users' current positions on the 19 by 19 grid above and a ranking below. PC 2 shows the main 19 by 19 grid, from Ppanpo Jjai at bottom left to Banpo Xi at top right, with live prices for all 361 entries.

The initial series: nineteen locations from Ppanpo and Sanpo to Banpo, and nineteen brands from Jjai to Xi, each series built on the nineteen Korean initial consonants. Prices range from 100 million won for Ppanpo Jjai to 10 billion won for Banpo Xi. The hierarchy formula P = 19L + B sets a linear ranking of all 361 entries (Ppanpo Jjai ... Ppanpo Xi ... Sanpo Xi ... Banpo Xi). At N = 1 and 2 this two-dimensional formula is absolute.

At N = 1 the interface resembles Instagram Explore. Each scroll down moves one step along the series, so 360 scrolls are needed to reach the top; moving left or right on a step reveals different card-news content, as in the Explore tab. The trigger is an advertisement reading "Meet a world of a different dimension." It affirms and ridiculously exaggerates minimal marginal difference and capitalist desire, in the manner of The Palace 73's slogan "For you who dream of inequality," exposing vulgar capitalism and fetishism, with advertising art by Yoko Ono and Barbara Kruger as references. The more one scrolls, the more repeatedly and blatantly it appears, inviting a click. The click leads to a new mobile URL, a new dimension.

The original plan was to climb linearly, N = 1, 2, 3, 4, with only one way up (two dimensions, then three, then four). Its drawbacks: it is hard to understand, hard to implement, its mathematical and physical assumptions are unintuitive, and it cannot accommodate multiple modalities. The earlier square-inside-square layout also made little sense and was awkward to use. The new plan is distributed: several hyperlinks connected to one another through advertisements. From one link a visitor sees an advertisement and moves to another. The links act as vertices and edges, connected rhizomatically into a directed graph G(V, E), through which users can explore simultaneously, using advertisements as their means of travel. Only the first step, N = 1, leads by a single link to N = 2; from N = 2 on there are many routes that multiple users can navigate freely.

The key rule: one link equals one interface, one modality and one function or programme, with multiple advertisements leading to other links. Links could carry a dimension number such as ?n=2, but it is more effective to give each an independent identifier such as voice, face detection, phone shake or coordinate edit. Each interface supports an intuitive interaction and corresponds to a single modality (voice, finger, face detection, shaking, with more possible later) through which visitors can distort the Media Wall in their own way. Through parametric mapping, each modality performs a specific function on the Media Wall. Shaking the phone, for example, does not merely rotate the camera viewing the manifold but rotates the manifold itself, which radically changes the price of each apartment on the fixed location-brand road grid. This close relation between modality and function works as force, in the sense of Nietzsche's will to power.

Each interface carries several advertisements leading intuitively to other links. They need not connect to every link; a directed-graph structure is enough. The advertisements are the most textual content on the phone. They may take different forms (modal, pop-up, embedded) according to each interface's layout, but their design is strictly unified: white background, black text, Pretendard Bold, capitalist slogans. The links should be developed modularly so that every one is interesting enough and visibly distorts the Media Wall.

Principles. Cold media: avoid, as far as possible, guidance such as "try interacting like this", labels for parameters, or text explaining what is happening, the kindly text-based instructions common in interactive art. Instead the look of the interface itself (toggles, sliders, arrows, composition and layout as nudges) comes first, so that visitors perform an operation naturally and experience in real time how it distorts the Media Wall and displays, intuitively, non-verbally, forcefully, bodily and instrumentally. No direct context or explanation of what an interaction does is ever offered; only the advertisement text on the previous link nudges toward it.

Force and Dionysus: whatever the modality (finger, voice, shake), it must distort the Media Wall through Nietzschean will to power and Dionysian qualities, signifying the visitor's autonomy and liberation from Cartesian reason. This is already partly implemented through voice and accelerometer-based shaking. The models are Paik's TV magnet and Jackson Pollock's drip paintings.

The advertisements take the form of text-centred propaganda, matching the displays' visual style with Pretendard Bold filling the screen, after Jenny Holzer, Young-Hae Chang Heavy Industries, Barbara Kruger and Yoko Ono. They borrow familiar capitalist copy, "Experience a higher dimension," "Be the protagonist," "Change the board," "Shake the world," which borrows capitalist desire while hinting directly at the next modality: a higher dimension really raises the dimension, "raise your voice" leads to voice interaction, "shake" to accelerometer shaking, "change the board" to an interaction that changes the coordinate system. It is a kind of Dadaist connection.

Multi-user accommodation is crucial. A new programme must never start by resetting the Media Wall to the Cartesian plane; it is layered on top of the twisted result left by previous interactions. Moving to a new link must never reset the whole manifold. The logic is AND, not OR: if one visitor adjusts N = 2, another uses voice and a third shakes their phone, all three effects appear cumulatively at once, the field reordered, expanded and rotated together. When several people use the same link, rules are needed. If two adjust N = 2 at once (one choosing Hanpo-Taism five seconds ago, another Ganpo-Kkaism one second ago), the field follows the latest user, Ganpo-Kkaism. If two use voice, their inputs are summed to disperse the manifold. Each link must therefore be classed as competition-based (N = 2) or collaboration-based and cumulative (voice). Some interactions are time-dependent (shake, voice) and others are not, which must also be considered. The overall transformation is a vector sum.

Current list, by advertising copy, modality and description:

"Meet a world of a different dimension" is a special case: the same copy leads to different links depending on where it appears (from two dimensions to three, from three to four), raising the mathematical dimension, N = 1 to 5, to collapse the hierarchy. At each level the participant can adjust as many parameters as there are dimensions, intuitively. N = 1 and 2 keep the flat plane; at N = 3, finger skating on the phone lifts the plane into three dimensions, the y-axis height yielding the price P; from N = 4 on, this lifted terrain twists into a torus and other higher-dimensional manifolds. Each step also links to other programmes besides dimension control.

"Raise your voice" is already working in an earlier build but mixed with other modalities, breaking the one-link rule, so it will be reworked into an interface that asks only for voice. At the centre, the N = 1 interface for the currently highlighted apartment, at the same scale as the N = 2 build, changes price with the voice, and the central interface itself rescales as direct visual feedback. Unlike N = 2, which navigates among 361 entries, there is a single interface that deforms with the loudness of the voice. A slider below, again without a text label, sets the intensity, changing the voice sensitivity. Advertisements appear as a banner and pop-up.

"Be the protagonist" uses face detection, details to be decided. "Shake the world" (perhaps there is better copy) uses phone shake, similar in modality and function to the existing shake, but rebuilt as a single link with a single modality and function: as with voice, the N = 1 interface sits at the centre and its angle and price change as the phone is shaken. "Change the board" is coordinate editing: literally turning the Cartesian coordinate system into cylindrical, spherical or other three-dimensional systems, working alongside the high-dimensional manifold edits. More ideas may be added.

N = 2, already implemented: scrolling up, down, left or right is not simple movement but overturns the hierarchy of the series itself, so that [Ppanpo ... Banpo], with Banpo at the top, becomes [Banpo, Ppanpo, ... Manpo]. There are 19 by 19 cards, with advertisements for different programmes in the outer two rows and columns.

The most important thing is mobile interaction, under three conditions. First, it must be free, like Paik's TV magnet, affirming wherever the finger goes: not moving only inside a fixed GUI but affirming the finger's positions as it roams freely over the interface, just as the image changes intuitively when a magnet moves freely over a TV. Second, finger skating: designing for the finger, so that moving smoothly back and forth without lifting the finger changes parameters and thus the Media Wall's behaviour. Like playing the violin, or the piano quickly, continuous finger movement continuously changes the Media Wall through a parameter mapping, the principle of instrumental design, with scrolling and scroll damping. Not the discrete interaction of pressing a button, lifting and pressing again, but the finger skating elegantly over the phone while changing hidden parameters in real time, as the image behind a TV changes smoothly when the magnet moves. Third, field-based operation: adjusting the physical field (originally Banpo-Xism) in differential-geometric terms, the field's natural language. The result is the collapse of hierarchy, authority and one-directionality, the counterpunch to television.

System mechanism, settled points: interactions on the phones collectively affect the Media Wall's field of 19 by 19 apartments, lifting the two-dimensional Cartesian plane off, bending it and varying it. Overlapping and simultaneous interactions from many phones appear on the manifold as a summed vector, so visitors vary Banpo-Xism together. Projection logic: from the bent manifold, coordinates are projected back onto the two-dimensional grid of road layout, the (L, B) system, and these projected values decide the altered prices of the 361 apartments. At N = 3, the lifting stage, finger skating raises the plane along the y-axis and the height becomes the new price, a three-dimensional departure from the original location-bound formula and the collapse of P = 19L + B. From N = 4, the topological collapse stage, the whole field twists nonlinearly, the heights fluctuate with it, and each apartment's price changes: a slight interaction in a high dimension produces radical price change and hierarchy inversion, so the initially intuitive lifting ends in an incomprehensible collapse of hierarchy.

All screens reflect, in real time, prices and coordinates projected from the bent Media Wall, so the PC coordinate display intuitively explains how phone interaction rewrites the price hierarchy.

Sound: a "Hymn to Banpo-Xism" made with Suno (lyric: "Banpo Xi, living here feels like my dream"). At N = 1 the original plays; from N = 2 it begins to distort. The further Banpo Xi's price departs from 10 billion won, higher or lower, the stronger the distortion, using playback rate and other algorithms to make the high-dimensional manifold audible.

Scaffolding toward N = 1 to 7. N = 1 is the trap: Instagram-style scrolling, one step at a time, a frog-in-the-well interaction that stirs competition and dopamine among users and invites aggressive scrolling; its message is the bloody yet arid competition of a low dimension. N of 2 and above is the awakening: phone change, manifold change, price change, display change, a chain that non-art audiences must grasp intuitively without dropping out. The method is McLuhan's cold medium: never state the rules, the system or the hidden dimensions in text; visitors must grasp the concepts implicitly through experience; do not teach. The many links and connections, after N = 1 and N = 2, let visitors navigate by different advertising copy, and this navigational freedom, combined with multiple users editing the Media Wall through different modalities and functions on different links at once, gives great scenario-like freedom, a real, higher-dimensional freedom of "integration". Every dimensional update should be visually pleasing and interesting, giving dopamine systematically with clear feedback loops. Dionysian destruction: the solid hierarchy of N = 1 is destroyed playfully by the will to power at higher dimensions. Multimodal expandability: voice pitch expands the coordinate layout and widens price gaps; shaking rotates the manifold's angle and changes coordinates and prices in real time; each modality lives on its own link.

Implementation notes: the first builds are temporary test routes, to be renamed later, so route dependencies must be minimised.

Cautions: be a cold medium, never a hot one (McLuhan). Do not state the process, the rules or the hidden dimensions directly; design for natural exploration and nudging. Clicking an advertisement must come from voluntary curiosity, the visitor wanting to click, not compulsion; hence the advertisements borrow capitalist copy in the displays' text style and lead to different links, after Holzer, Kruger, Young-Hae Chang Heavy Industries and Ono. Each upgrade, a new hyperlink or modality, should occur naturally and, through the estrangement effect (Verfremdungseffekt), surprise by breaking existing rules and hierarchies.

The key message. According to superstring theory in modern physics, the universe holds a vast freedom of ten or twenty-six dimensions. Yet our desire has been flattened and castrated onto a narrow two-dimensional Cartesian plane: one axis is location, Banpo; the other is brand, Xi. On the cramped coordinates of Banpo-Xism we believe only the upper right is the answer and squabble to produce minimal marginal differences from others, cramming desires that could extend infinitely and colourfully into points on a thin plane, absorbed in ranking.

The project exposes the two-dimensional world we believed absolute as an imperfect shadow of a higher-dimensional reality. On a high-dimensional manifold, twisting a single variable slightly crumples and overturns the seemingly solid two-dimensional hierarchy like a sheet of paper. Those bound to the rules of the plane will meet the collapse of their world without knowing why, but visitors who perceive the higher dimension see how flimsy and breakable an illusion the system is.

In the end it is a proposal to be the designer rather than the slave of the system: to stop living a flat life queuing passively on given coordinates and move to a life of integration, raising the dimension and redesigning the board itself; to smash the vast social simulacrum of people confined in identical matchbox apartments absorbed in narrow, meaningless distinction, and to recover a real higher-dimensional freedom beyond the closed plane of signs.

What does moving to a higher dimension mean? Realising that a value taken for granted, beyond dispute, treated as an immutable constant (z = c; the sky rotates, as in geocentrism) is in fact a variable that can change, a parameter (z can change; the Earth moves, as in heliocentrism). A new parametric interaction is a movement to a higher dimension, even if not strictly mathematical. The intervention of a new modality programme shows how "low-dimensional" the Media Wall on the Cartesian plane was, and how tweaking a new parameter in a higher dimension can provoke the existing value system, P = 19L + B.

So there is not only one way of integrating, of moving up. The dt or dx of an integral, its direction, can take countless directions, and it is up to us to recognise these possibilities and interact within them, overcoming the Media Wall by integrating it. The work's structure makes this possible: variation, rhizome, mutability and hyperlinked interaction, from link to link and parameter to parameter, from one method of integration to another, by taste, chance and choice. The moment real estate becomes movable property (dongsan) is the moment the users who competed in a zero-sum game at N = 1 perform an ensemble that changes the Media Wall through different modalities and links.

Drafts for the wall text and leaflet follow. The newer version: South Korea is sick with Banpo-Xism. Desire is flattened and castrated inside a two-dimensional plane made only of location (Banpo) and brand (Xi). People squabble to distinguish minimal marginal differences between identical concrete matchboxes. It is pure comedy. This web work begins from apartments, images, sound, text and code made with AI. Visitors scroll passively on their phones, struggling to reach a higher location and brand. But the moment they click an advertisement with provocative copy and escape into another hyperlink, Banpo-Xism is integrated. The fixed plane moves, becomes a doughnut and finally begins to dance. Simultaneous interactions across the hyperlinks turn an immutable constant (z = c) into a fluid variable (the integral of dz). The flat plane crumples like paper and is integrated into a high-dimensional differentiable manifold where interactive desires collide. It is the moment Riemann is born from Descartes, dongsan from budongsan. Visitors realise they have left two-dimensional Banpo-Xism and are part of the vast ten-dimensional universe of superstring theory. Let us escape the social simulacrum represented by Banpo-Xism and become designers, not slaves, of the system. The leaflet draft begins with the same opening and breaks off.

An earlier version (Version 1) opens: South Korea is sick with Banpo-Xism, comparing itself endlessly with others and castrating individual desire onto a narrow Cartesian plane. It states that Banpo-Xism shows through differential geometry that the two-dimensional world is an imperfect shadow of higher-dimensional reality, and that those who perceive it see how easily the Cartesian plane is destroyed by Riemannian geometry. It calls on visitors to be designers and players rather than slaves of the system, and notes that the interactive web work was made with AI tools such as Claude Code, offering through its hyperlink structure the experience of integrating the two-dimensional space of Banpo-Xism into higher dimensions directly on one's phone. Version 2 repeats the superstring-theory key message above.

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