# Everyday Interface as Systematic Output Canonical URL: https://jeanyoon.ch/oi/texts/everyday-interface-as-systematic-output Type: essay / research note Author: Jeanyoon Choi (최정윤) Date: 2025-04-15 ## Summary In this 2025 note, Jeanyoon Choi proposes everyday interfaces as a subtle, metaphorical output for system art. A supermarket flyer or a station departure board already registers economics, climate, politics and weather, and black swan events make those hidden conditions visible. The essay distinguishes data visualisation from parameterising an existing visual system, in which interest rates, climate or trade would alter a flyer's prices and produce. It also considers repeated calendars, apartment plans, detached commercial displays and dashboards that move from calm to breakdown. ## 요약 (Korean) 최정윤의 에세이로, 동네 마트 전단지나 광명역 열차 출발 안내판 같은 일상의 인터페이스를 시스템 아트의 출력으로 삼아, 데이터 시각화 대신 기존 시각 체계를 파라미터화하는 방식을 제안한다. ## Concepts defined - **Everyday interface as systematic output**: Using ordinary interfaces people already encounter, such as flyers, departure boards or calendars, as the audiovisual output of system art, so that the changing parameters of a large system appear through them subtly rather than as explicit data. - **Data parameterisation**: Contrasted with data visualisation: an existing visual system operates on parameters, and when those parameters change, the system's familiar output changes accordingly. ## Questions this answers ### What does Jeanyoon Choi mean by 'everyday interface as systematic output'? In 'Everyday Interface as Systematic Output', Jeanyoon Choi argues that ordinary surfaces such as supermarket flyers and departure boards are already outputs of entangled social, economic and ecological systems. System art could parameterise these familiar interfaces so that changing conditions appear through them, rather than through a direct data visualisation. ### What is the difference between data visualisation and data parameterisation in system art? In Jeanyoon Choi's essay, data visualisation depicts system parameters directly as charts or dashboards. Parameterisation takes an existing visual system, such as a neighbourhood supermarket flyer, and lets variables like interest rates, climate or trade conditions change its prices, produce and imports. ### How can a black swan event make hidden systems visible through ordinary interfaces? The essay notes that everyday interfaces look repetitive in the short term, but during a black swan event familiar produce disappears from a flyer or a departure board fills with cancellations. Jeanyoon Choi suggests an artwork could amplify this instability. Topics: system art, everyday interface, data parameterisation, data visualisation, black swan events, hyperobject, dashboard aesthetics References: Gwangmyeong Station, [Black swan theory](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_swan_theory), [Andy Warhol](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andy_Warhol), [2001: A Space Odyssey](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2001:_A_Space_Odyssey), [HAL 9000](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HAL_9000), Banpo-Xism, Hannam Bridge ## Full text 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. --- 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.