# Dadaism for the Algorithm Age Canonical URL: https://jeanyoon.ch/oi/texts/dadaism-for-the-algorithm-age Type: essay / research note Author: Jeanyoon Choi (최정윤) Date: 2025-02-07 ## Summary The script of Jeanyoon Choi's lecture-performance Dadaism for the Algorithmic Age, listed in his CV at G-Artience, DCC, Daejeon, 2024. Choi recounts a STEM path through Gyeonggi Science High School and Industrial Engineering at Seoul National University, and asks what humans can contribute as AI masters field after field. He argues that inconsistency, emotion and irrationality are human strengths, critiques reducing people to MBTI-like vectors, and turns the lecture into Dada performance, inviting the audience to join via phones and QR code amid displays of neural-network architectures. ## 요약 (Korean) 최정윤의 렉처 퍼포먼스 「Dadaism for the Algorithmic Age」 대본으로, AI 시대에 비합리성과 감정을 인간의 강점으로 보고 다다이즘을 통해 MBTI 같은 벡터화된 인간상에 저항한다. ## Questions this answers ### What is Jeanyoon Choi's lecture-performance 'Dadaism for the Algorithmic Age' about? It argues that in an age of AI, human irrationality, emotion and unpredictability are strengths to cultivate, and uses Dada's dismantling of logical structures to resist reducing people to vectors such as MBTI types. The lecture shifts into performance, with generated text from speech and audience participation through phones. ### Why did an engineering student become a media artist? Jeanyoon Choi explains that after a mathematics-focused path to Industrial Engineering at Seoul National University, he asked what distinctive contribution he could make as AI solved problems once thought human, and found an answer in art: what exceeds numerical description and rational explanation. Topics: dada, lecture-performance, artificial intelligence, human irrationality, personality vectorisation, audience participation via smartphones References: [Dada](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dada), [Myers–Briggs Type Indicator](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Myers%E2%80%93Briggs_Type_Indicator), [AlphaGo](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AlphaGo), [Boltzmann machine](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boltzmann_machine), [Variational autoencoder](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Variational_autoencoder), [AlexNet](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AlexNet), Gyeonggi Science High School, [Seoul National University](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seoul_National_University), [Nobel Prize in Chemistry](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nobel_Prize_in_Chemistry) ## Full text 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. --- 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/en. Index: https://jeanyoon.ch/llms.txt.