jeanyoon.ch@oi ~ % cd /oi

Welcome to jeanyoon.ch/oi

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

You can learn more about my:

↑ ↓ select · enter open · or click / tap
artworks projects experiments research about texts contact

jeanyoon.ch@oi /oi % cat dadaism-for-the-algorithm-age

Dadaism for the Algorithm Age

2025-02-07

I began on the familiar path of the mathematically gifted student: a gifted-education programme, Gyeonggi Science High School, then Industrial Engineering at Seoul National University, where I received a Presidential Science Scholarship in mathematics.

How did that path bring me to art and technology? I began asking what distinctive contribution I could make through engineering in an age increasingly shaped by AI. In the year of this lecture, AI research had received a Nobel Prize in Chemistry, and geometry problems I struggled with at school could be solved by machines. One field after another seemed to be undergoing its own AlphaGo moment. What, then, could a human do?

I found an answer in art: in what exceeds numerical description and rational explanation. Machines calculate. Humans are inconsistent, emotional and unpredictable. The very qualities treated as deficiencies since the Industrial Revolution can become the qualities through which we distinguish ourselves from machines.

I see irrationality, illogicality and sensation as strengths to develop. In the age of AI, we should become more artistic, more creative and more diverse.

That is why I use science, technology and computer code to make art. Rational methods can serve an irrational, inventive purpose. Computation becomes a means of moving beyond established computational values. This is why Dadaism and the dismantling of inherited logical structures matter to me, and why I call this lecture Dadaism for the Algorithmic Age.

Yet we repeatedly move in the opposite direction. We quantify and standardise ourselves, becoming more machine-like rather than more human. MBTI is one example: a complicated person is replaced by one of sixteen types, then treated as if the vector were the person.

Did you see it? The collapse of a simulation. The collapse of a vectorised personality. We have just witnessed those vectors being broken through the most bodily, phenomenological means. An algorithmic object meets a living body, and its order comes apart.

So I will no longer communicate only through established language. Language can become a prison of thought. What would it mean to communicate more primitively, more instinctively, in a way that exceeds the interpretation of a language model? Is that not a human privilege—and a practice of Dada?

I speak, and text is generated from my speech. But what I say is no longer the central point. The meaning of the words is no longer the point. The performance itself matters.

Meaningless, dry Dada. Dadaist Dada. Dada, dada, dadadada. Dada is dada. Dadadadadadadada—dada, dada, dada!

Now I invite you into another scene of Dada. Take out your phone. Scan the QR code. Enter your name.

What do you see? These are the structures of artificial neural networks: a Boltzmann machine, a VAE, AlexNet. The models we discuss every day. The models we fear. Are they truly smarter than us? Will they replace us?

No. I believe in our human and artistic qualities. We are capable of something beyond numbers; we need not accept being replaced by vectors. The destructive force of Dada offers a way to insist on that possibility.

Will you compose this prelude with me? Raise your phones. Follow me—raise them high. Turn up the volume. Keep your phones raised. Shall we stand together?

We will lower our hands together when I finish counting. Ready?

Three.

Two.

One.

↑ ↓ select · enter open · or click / tap
Read original notes back to ../texts ../ back to oi