# Banpo-Xism Artist Notes: March 2026 Canonical URL: https://jeanyoon.ch/oi/texts/banpo-xism-artist-notes-2026-03 Type: essay / research note Author: Jeanyoon Choi (최정윤) Date: 2026-03-24 ## Summary Jeanyoon Choi's March 2026 notes for Banpo-Xism redirect the Text Tower from describing apartments to voicing the psychology behind them, drafting a 'Gossip Wall' of neighbourhood snobbery and reading the apartment obsession as Nietzschean slave morality. The artist frames advertising as the means of 'integration', turning the fixed parameter z = c into a variable and pointing from the Cartesian plane toward Riemannian, superstring-scale reality, and writes a polemic arguing that South Korea is sick with Banpo-Xism not because it is too unequal but because it is too equal, its people competing over minimal marginal differences in concrete. Later entries refine advertising copy and natural link navigation, and a self-critique finds the build too game-like, too fast and lacking aura. ## 요약 (Korean) 최정윤의 2026년 3월 『반포자이즘』 노트는 텍스트 타워를 아파트 묘사가 아닌 계급 심리와 노예적 도덕을 드러내는 '가십 월'로 재정의하고, 광고를 2차원 데카르트 평면을 넘어서는 '적분'의 창구로 규정한다. 대한민국은 너무 불평등해서가 아니라 너무 동일해서 반포자이즘에 병들어 있다는 선언과 함께, 작품이 너무 게임 같고 아우라가 부족하다는 자기 비평을 담는다. ## Concepts defined - **Gossip Wall**: The Text Tower reconceived as a field of public opinion that voices the class psychology behind apartment locations and brands through gossip-like lines, rather than describing the apartments. - **slave capitalism**: The artist's name for a materialism in which everyone pursues the same lumps of concrete, becoming 'equal', servile and confined to minimal marginal differences. ## Questions this answers ### What is the Text Tower or Gossip Wall in Banpo-Xism? In Jeanyoon Choi's March 2026 notes, the Text Tower is not a description of apartments but a field of public opinion voicing the psychology of class and distinction, through gossip lines such as 'Will I ever get to live here in this life?' and snobbish remarks about neighbourhoods. ### Why does Jeanyoon Choi say South Korea is sick with Banpo-Xism? The notes argue the problem is not excessive inequality but excessive sameness: people pursue the same lumps of concrete and stake their lives on minimal marginal differences, a 'slave capitalism' confined to a two-dimensional plane of location and brand. ### What role do advertisements play in Banpo-Xism? Jeanyoon Choi describes the advertisement as the window to a wider reality: it performs 'integration', turning fixed parameters into variables and leading visitors beyond the Cartesian plane of Banpo-Xism. Topics: Text Tower and gossip texts, slave morality, minimal marginal difference, advertising as integration, Cartesian versus Riemannian space, superstring theory as metaphor, affirmation of desire, natural link navigation, aura and pacing in interactive art References: [Friedrich Nietzsche](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Friedrich_Nietzsche), [Master-slave morality](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Master%E2%80%93slave_morality), [René Descartes](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ren%C3%A9_Descartes), [Bernhard Riemann](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bernhard_Riemann), [Superstring theory](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superstring_theory), [Gangnam District](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gangnam_District), [Han River (Korea)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Han_River_(Korea)) ## Full text 17 March 2026 On the Text Tower. It should not be thought of as an ordinary text tower. It carries, in a compound way, particular values and valuations. It is not just explicitly about apartments or real estate, but about the "substance of slave morality" fixed immutably in our psychology and minds: slave values. It is not a description of the complex or the object. "A fortress-like complex in the middle of Gangnam" is wrong; "Will I ever get to live here in this life?" is right. The tower acts as a field of psychology and public opinion. It is not about an apartment's specifications, geographical or brand, but about the psychology behind them: the castrated psychology that insists on manufacturing minimal marginal differences and distinctions. The role of the advertisement is liberation from this: "Don't you sometimes feel like a frog in a well?" The direction, then, is to focus less on describing location and brand than on the point where such descriptions connect to psychological and class states. Draft lines for what becomes the "Gossip Wall" or "Gossip Text", with placeholders for a user's name and neighbourhood: "Ppanpo-dong? It smells every time I pass through there..." "[Name]'s mum, if you live in [X]-dong, how will you send the kids to cram school?" "What's the point of living in [brand] if the neighbourhood is [X]-dong?" "Aren't there lots of foreigners there? Sounds scary." "Isn't commuting really inconvenient from [X]-dong?" "People from [X]-dong, just filter them out, seriously." "My goal is to escape [X]-dong and move." "The upper-tier neighbourhoods really are different..." On modality: head rotation and phone rotation should be used to adjust the rotation values (alpha and beta) of the manifold. 20 March 2026 Linking to the location-brand plane. Each apartment, "X-po Y-i", should be detached. The mobile tags (XXX YYY) correspond to coordinates and, likewise, recognise only 1 to 19; the Text Tower also recognises only 1 to 19; P = 19L + B is the rule of the coordinate system. Integrate! This two-dimensional world is too childish. Go beyond the two-dimensional square, beyond the Cartesian plane: Riemann rather than Descartes, three, four, five dimensions and higher. Integration is the process of turning the parameter z = c into one where z can move. The advertisement stands for a differentiable manifold of desire: diversity, subjectivity, inquiry. Compared with the vast higher-dimensional reality, what a tiny square this is. Climbing to a higher dimension shows how shabby, how "flat" the lower one becomes, incomprehensible to the old coordinate system. z = c becomes z can be everything. This process of integration is the role of the advertisement: going beyond the simulacrum of the Cartesian plane called Banpo-Xism. What is Banpo-Xism? Stratification into classes, a psychology, exclusivity, distinction, the capitalisation of space. The work does not say that discrimination or minimal marginal difference is itself wrong. Rather it asks: is this really distinction? Is it not childish? How long will you confine yourself to a two-dimensional plane? Can you not go further, higher? How long will you stay castrated? Affirm. Affirm difference and maximise it, not by making differences over concrete on a flat plane. Go beyond the boards, rules and systems others have made; create your own world, your own higher-dimensional vector field. This is not a denial of desire but its affirmation, a strong affirmation. Why stay passive, like a camel, inside frames others have set? Become a lion, become a child, not inside a dependent interface that binds you. Play with the phone as an interface, as an instrument. Affirm the finger, affirm desire, truly. Toward an infinite higher-dimensional world where everything is possible: integrate. Beyond jostling and squabbling, trapped inside a square like a frog in a well, beyond the competition of slaves, beyond slaves consoling themselves that their ornaments shine brighter, lies a large, infinite, diverse, endless, wave-like reality. Head for higher dimensions. Is this two-dimensional world not too cramped? It must be overcome, stepped over, laid flat and passed. Look: the world described by physics, the universe reality points to, is vast. If you are going to pursue an unequal world, at least pursue it truly broadly. The world is unequal, but acquiring one lump of concrete in your way is only a more two-dimensional, Cartesian, castrated dream, a camel's dream, a dream of squares. You castrated ones, why do you not dream of something wider? Here the true higher dimension is decided. You fight over a flat plane, but the world is wide. Why stake your life on a small plane before your eyes when superstring theory speaks of a ten-dimensional world? How can the dream and life goal of a fresh teenager be merely a "Han River view apartment", a lump of concrete? Such materialism is vulgar. In pursuing the same matter, the same materials, everyone is "equal", servile and plebeian. This is slave capitalism. Differentiable manifolds and superstring theory allow "wide", higher dimensions. Destroy fabricated reason and discover an irrational order; the destruction of outward form, dynamic rhythm. Curve, curve. Go beyond every square, the dream of squares, castrated forces, Banpo-Xism. Yes, South Korea is sick with Banpo-Xism. Not because it is too unequal, but the opposite: because it is too equal, too identical. Lives are unhappy because people hang everything on gaining a tiny difference within the smallest of differences. The world is so wide, yet people are desperate to become slaves, like slaves comparing whose handcuffs shine brighter. What poverty of imagination: how can one think only inside frames and systems others have offered? Can one not see outside them? Has Descartes still not been overcome? Are you not curious how the simulacrum can be destroyed and bent, what exists "beyond this"? Why stake your life on moving to a better cell within a prison someone else built, rather than seeing what lies outside the prison? What, after all, exists "beyond this"? Look at the two-dimensional plane from a higher dimension: does it not look shabby? The links should ultimately be multimodal, so that the work can be chewed, torn, tasted and enjoyed. 22 March 2026 Advertising copy should start from personal experience and from what people actually experience. The mobile tag text should suggest the values that location and brand signify rather than pointing directly at them. "South Korea is sick with Banpo-Xism": Banpo-Xism as a single value, a slave value. "South Korea is sick with Banpo-Xism. But look, is there not a wider world?" Against the paradox of comparison, the paradox of minimal marginal difference, neoliberal castration: set out and sail toward the wider reality. Link navigation must be natural, very natural, as if visitors were simply using their own phones as usual, opening a new app, trying something new. What each programme is and how to move between links must be shown clearly; it must not be difficult or tiresome. Chew, tear, taste, enjoy: there must be a desperate, extreme clamour toward reality, down to the abyss. Through this, visitors should feel how illusory the dream of squares before their eyes was, and how easily it could be overturned. It was only a fantasy, and why was so much effort poured into that thin fantasy? The world is wide, and reality wider still. Yet you hung your life on a single lump of concrete and the minimal marginal differences around it. On advertising: the advertisement is the window that connects to this reality, to the wider world. 24 March 2026 Does the whole have the intended feeling? Does it have an aura? It feels too much like a game, too hectic, without aura. The overall progression is too fast, especially from N1 to N2, which unfolds too abruptly. The manifold links of course need organising and aligning. Rather than many links, there should be a small number, each a premium link. The Text Tower should show its hierarchy clearly from the start, and its later collapse should also unfold step by step. --- 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.