# i': ODM - Auto-generating systems

Canonical URL: https://jeanyoon.ch/oi/texts/i-odm-auto-generating-systems
Type: essay / research note
Author: Jeanyoon Choi (최정윤)
Date: 2025-03-18

## Summary

In this 2025 essay, Jeanyoon Choi takes OEM and ODM manufacturing, fabless semiconductor design and the cosmetics industry as examples of production separated from ownership of factories. He is interested in systems that produce other systems: when implementation becomes accessible, the question shifts from surviving inside a structure to choosing what structure to create. System art could expose an apparently inevitable order as a constructed simulacrum. He invokes Nietzsche's camel and child and relates the idea to his own move from industrial engineering toward design.

## 요약 (Korean)

최정윤은 ODM·OEM 생산과 팹리스 구조, 한국 화장품 산업을 예로 들어, 시스템 속 부품으로 사는 대신 아이디어만으로 시스템을 생성하는 전환을 시스템 아트가 보여줄 수 있다고 주장한다.

## Concepts defined

- **Auto-generating systems**: Systems that produce other systems, so that the central question becomes which structures to bring into existence rather than how to survive within an existing one.

## Questions this answers

### What does ODM manufacturing have to do with system art, according to Jeanyoon Choi?

In 'i': ODM - Auto-generating systems', Jeanyoon Choi uses ODM and OEM manufacturing as examples of systems that let ideas become products without owning a factory, and argues that system art can similarly show people generating and playing with systems instead of remaining components inside them.

### How does Jeanyoon Choi connect Nietzsche to system art?

He refers to Nietzsche's movement from the burden-bearing camel to the child who creates through play, describing a reversal in which people stop adapting to systems and make systems respond to their ideas.

Topics: system art, auto-generating systems, odm manufacturing, simulacrum, industrial engineering, rapid contextual change

References: [Original design manufacturer](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Original_design_manufacturer), [Original equipment manufacturer](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Original_equipment_manufacturer), [Fabless manufacturing](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fabless_manufacturing), [Friedrich Nietzsche](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Friedrich_Nietzsche), [Simulacrum](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simulacrum), Cosmax, Kolmar Korea

## Full text

The relationship between an idea and its production is changing. In industries organised around OEM or ODM manufacturing, a brand does not necessarily need its own factory. A similar separation exists between fabless semiconductor design and foundry production. The cosmetics industry offers a particularly vivid example: specialist manufacturers make it possible for many different brands to develop products without building the entire production infrastructure themselves.

What interests me is not simply cheaper production, but the possibility of systems that produce other systems. If the means of implementation become more accessible, the question can shift from how to survive inside an existing structure to what structure we want to bring into existence.

System art could make this shift tangible. It could expose an apparently inevitable order as a constructed arrangement—a simulacrum whose authority depends on our continuing to accept its terms. Instead of remaining components within it, participants could generate, rearrange, and play with systems of their own.

I return to Nietzsche's movement from the burden-bearing camel to the child who creates through play. There is something almost vengeful in this reversal: after spending so much time adapting ourselves to systems, we make systems respond to our ideas. Rapid changes of context become a creative capacity rather than a failure to specialise.

My own movement from industrial engineering toward design belongs to this question. Engineering taught me to understand and optimise an existing structure. Design opened the possibility of asking why that structure existed, and what another one might be.

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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.