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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 how-everyone-is-obsessed-with-base-interest-rates-and-how-i-am-obsessed-with-making-an-experience-out-of-such-an-obsession

How everyone is obsessed with Base Interest Rates and how I am obsessed with making an experience out of such an obsession

2024-03-27

I am fascinated by the collective fixation on base interest rates—and by the possibility of turning that fixation into an experience.

During the pandemic, very low rates accompanied dramatic changes in asset markets. Later increases produced another set of reactions. My point is not that one number independently explains an economy; I know the relationships are more complicated. What strikes me is how much attention, expectation and vulnerability can gather around a percentage.

A change in that number can propagate through rents, housing prices, investment and where people are able to live. Each step can appear reasonable while the combined result feels absurd. Too much local logic produces a globally illogical situation.

Everyone watches the number. Everyone waits for one person to speak. An entire system appears poised around a value that will change again. How fragile is a society organised in this way?

An installation sketch: one input device displays a percentage such as 3.XX. It could be an ordinary GUI or a handmade physical control. The participant can raise or lower it, but it need not be explicitly labelled as an interest rate.

More than ten surrounding screens form an ecosystem. Their images should act as an indirect metaphor for economic life rather than become a literal financial dashboard. I have not yet decided their precise visual language.

At first, the screens are relatively calm. A sharp change in the input provokes an exaggerated response: perhaps some screens cry while others laugh, with a deliberately excessive, humorous, Dadaist intensity. The participant encounters a world in which individual intentions seem small compared with a change in a symbolic number.

After about thirty seconds, the environment settles into another equilibrium. That return to calm is part of the problem. What has happened can be justified as a temporary disturbance on the way to long-term balance, even as the consequences accumulate.

References retained from the original notes: https://www.hani.co.kr/arti/economy/finance/1127169.html https://www.chosun.com/economy/int_economy/2024/02/01/MUQHIJRYZVEB7PN2KB67SOZMR4/ https://www.lgbr.co.kr/report/view.do?idx=3724

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