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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 every-object-is-part-of-the-system

Every Object is part of the System

2025-04-15

Every object is part of a system. Even the simple act of ordering coffee brings us into contact with overlapping histories, technologies, economies, and institutions.

The beans connect cultivation, climate, origin, trade, and labour. The person taking the order works within wage policy, employment conditions, training manuals, branding, and the possibility of automation. The coffee machine carries engineering decisions, maintenance arrangements, manufacturers, and a history of coffee culture. Furniture belongs to production networks and design fashions. A kiosk connects interface design to accessibility, labour costs, and payment fees. Background music passes through copyright, playlists, and platforms. The location of a large suburban café reflects land prices, urban growth, changing customers, and economic conditions. Even the price of a cup condenses demand, investment, branding, and the expectation of a return.

A cup becomes a global interface. An apparently small experience touches an enormous number of entangled systems.

Gwangmyeong Station makes these relationships even more visible. KTX service frequency involves engineering capacity, demand, the concentration of activity around Seoul, regional economies, tourism, and political arguments over railway routes. The relationship between KTX and SRT raises questions about competition and public infrastructure. Debates over privatisation lead outward to other countries and histories of neoliberal policy.

The station itself connects geography, construction budgets, new-town development, and demand from southern Seoul. Railway access affects commuting and housing prices; those prices affect where people live and how far they travel. Roads, railways, green belts, environmental policy, and metropolitan expansion cannot be treated as independent objects. Each is part of a changing arrangement of other systems.

I think about this as a frontend–backend relationship. The frontend offers a clean, orderly, comfortable experience. The backend is the complicated reality that makes it possible. Design often works to simplify the surface. System art can expose what that simplification conceals.

Hans Haacke's investigation of Manhattan real-estate holdings did not merely present buildings as objects. It traced ownership and power through the relationships behind them. The force of the work lies in making the underlying structure available to scrutiny.

Contemporary branding often promises a kind of disentanglement. The customer can enjoy an object without having to confront its consequences. Pay for convenience, discard the packaging, and forget the ecological relationships that remain after the transaction. We pay, in a sense, to forget that we are entangled. Marx's commodity fetishism belongs near this question, as does the tendency for a tool to become conspicuous when its smooth operation breaks down.

SoTA already explores a frontend and backend. I want to develop a more persistent relationship between them: not only a moment when the phone stops working and the concealed structure appears, but a situation in which that structure can itself remain interactive. What would it mean to act on the backend rather than merely discover it?

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