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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 everyday-interface-as-systematic-output

Everyday Interface as Systematic Output

2025-04-15

How can a system's changing parameters appear subtly, poetically, or metaphorically, rather than as a direct data visualisation? An everyday interface offers one possibility. I mean not only a web interface, but the ordinary surfaces through which we encounter the world. These surfaces already register the complex society around them.

A supermarket flyer contains prices affected by economic conditions and policy, products shaped by climate and agriculture, and imports affected by geopolitics. Its selections also imply particular customers. A departure board at Gwangmyeong Station registers railway technology, political decisions about stations, the concentration of activity in Seoul, and weather that delays or cancels trains. What looks like a simple display is an output of many entangled systems.

In the short term, such interfaces reassure us with repetition. Tomorrow appears likely to resemble today. Over longer periods, or during a black swan event, their contents can change dramatically: familiar produce disappears from a flyer; a departure board fills with cancellations. What we call an exception makes a larger, less visible condition perceptible. An artwork could amplify this instability through the ordinary interfaces that normally make life seem predictable.

This is a distinction between visualising data and parameterising an existing visual system. In a neighbourhood supermarket flyer, interest rates could alter prices and discounts, climate could alter the available produce, and trade conditions could change the selection of imports. Even this modest printed object can become a systematic expression of changing relationships.

The vocabulary can extend to commercial interfaces, generative forms, typography, small multiples, profiles, avatars, networks, maps, and advertising. Generating these objects is increasingly easy. The more interesting problem is making them dynamic parts of a system. Both input and output could be everyday interfaces, while the system between them remains something too large to encounter directly.

Repetition offers another direction. A calendar embodies standardised social time: wages, appointments, scarcity, the feeling of being imprisoned by a schedule. What happens when calendars multiply? Could repeating this familiar system turn its authority into play, through a Warhol-like accumulation of small differences? Apartment plans and their prices suggest a related possibility for Banpo-Xism.

An interface could also detach from the product it supposedly serves: an ordinary apple presented through a luxurious commercial display. Dashboards could move between calm monitoring and breakdown. The termination of life-function displays in 2001: A Space Odyssey is an especially forceful example of a graph becoming an event.

Watching traffic from a footbridge near Hannam Bridge, I think about the flux of interface states. From above, purposeful journeys can resemble the movements of insects or particles. Every driver has somewhere to go; the distant view makes that purpose almost disappear. I am interested in holding these two perspectives together.

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