# Every Object is part of the System Canonical URL: https://jeanyoon.ch/oi/texts/every-object-is-part-of-the-system Type: essay / research note Author: Jeanyoon Choi (최정윤) Date: 2025-04-15 ## Summary This 2025 essay traces how ordering coffee touches cultivation, trade, wages, automation, copyright, land prices and investment, and how Gwangmyeong Station connects KTX and SRT competition, privatisation debates, housing prices and metropolitan expansion. Jeanyoon Choi frames this as a frontend–backend relationship: design smooths the surface, while system art, as in Hans Haacke's investigation of Manhattan real estate, can expose the structure behind it. He links branding's promise of disentanglement to commodity fetishism and aims to make the backend in his work SoTA persistently interactive. ## 요약 (Korean) 최정윤은 커피 한 잔과 광명역이 얼마나 많은 시스템과 얽혀 있는지 추적하며, 매끈한 프런트엔드 뒤의 복잡한 백엔드를 드러내는 시스템 아트와 『SoTA』의 발전 방향을 논한다. ## Concepts defined - **Frontend–backend relationship**: Choi's model in which the frontend is the clean, comfortable experience design offers and the backend is the complicated reality of entangled systems that makes it possible and that system art can expose. ## Questions this answers ### What is system art according to Jeanyoon Choi? In 'Every Object is part of the System', Choi describes system art as exposing the complicated backend reality that a clean, comfortable frontend conceals, citing Hans Haacke's tracing of ownership and power behind Manhattan real estate. ### How is a cup of coffee connected to global systems? Jeanyoon Choi traces a cup of coffee to cultivation, climate, trade and labour, to wage policy and automation, to machine engineering, kiosk interface design, music copyright and land prices, calling the cup a global interface. ### How does Jeanyoon Choi want to develop the frontend and backend in SoTA? He wants to move beyond a moment when the phone stops working and the concealed structure appears, toward a situation in which participants can act on the backend persistently rather than merely discover it. Topics: system art, entanglement, frontend and backend, commodity fetishism, infrastructure, institutional critique References: [Hans Haacke](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hans_Haacke), [Karl Marx](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karl_Marx), [Commodity fetishism](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commodity_fetishism), Gwangmyeong Station, [Korea Train Express (KTX)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Korea_Train_Express), SRT (Super Rapid Train), SoTA (artwork by Jeanyoon Choi and collaborators) ## Full text 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? --- 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.