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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 dimensional-transformation-system-parameterisation

Dimensional Transformation & System Parameterisation

2025-04-15

Most interactive systems follow a familiar sequence: input, perhaps a small adjustment, then output. A participant changes a parameter such as carbon concentration, and a visualisation changes accordingly. I am interested in inserting transformations on both sides of the system: input, input dimensional transformation, system, output dimensional transformation, output.

A gesture first becomes a set of system parameters. The system processes them, and its consequences are translated again into something the audience encounters. In an ecological example, everyday actions concerning consumption, policy, or traffic could affect climate parameters; these could produce changes in temperature or humidity; those changes could then appear as altered resources, disasters, or everyday situations.

The mappings need not be one-to-one, one-to-many, or many-to-one. They can be many-to-many. Seven input stations might affect five climate variables, while a single systemic condition could manifest across many different outputs. Like the blind men encountering an elephant, each interface would disclose only part of something larger. This structure could articulate the entanglement of a social or ecological system while keeping its computational relationships explicitly defined.

Why introduce dimensional transformation? Direct parameter control can make cause and effect too obvious. Moving a slider and watching the corresponding graph change leaves me asking what the interaction contributes beyond access to a setting. A piano that changes time on surrounding screens, or a combination of switches and voice that conducts a system, asks participants to establish a different mental model.

This transformation is also where context can enter. Why a piano? Why a switch? Why a voice? Why should this particular bodily action produce that systemic change? A carefully chosen relationship can give the interaction an implicit conceptual layer. Its justification should become specific enough for someone to grasp and feel, rather than remain an explanation supplied afterwards.

This connects to the idea of the interface as an instrument. Instrumental input is translated into system input; the system produces consequences; those consequences are translated into an interface output. In a possible play garden, screaming, tapping, swiping, or other actions available to children could map into the nine planetary boundaries. The ecological model would then affect how the garden appears and behaves. Seven kinds of action might map into nine parameters, without each action belonging exclusively to one.

The structure resembles a simulation. Yet the question is not only whether the model reproduces a system. It is how the transformations around that model create an experience—and what kind of relationship they let us establish with it.

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