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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 integration-of-real-world-api-real-world-data-collaged-collective-world

Integration of real-world api/real-world data & Collaged Collective World

2024-08-14

I keep returning to the importance of live material. In my notes on Nam June Paik’s early Wuppertal exhibition, the limited hours of television broadcasting mattered because he was transforming a signal arriving from outside the work. Cildo Meireles’s Babel offers another powerful encounter with the accumulation of radio and popular culture.

The web makes external, changing sources unusually accessible. That differs from calling a language model in real time: an immediate generated response is not necessarily a live connection to an event outside the system. Broadcasts, transport data and other current signals introduce a different relation to the world.

The third movement of Civilisation explored a version of this through simulated APIs. That was useful as a speculative graphic reflection, but I want to investigate what a genuinely live connection would change. What can the repetition, randomness and cyclicality of MDWA contribute?

I imagine a collective painting, with something of the collage-like energy of Basquiat or Twombly. Different regions of a canvas could respond independently to different parts of contemporary life while continuing to coexist in one composition. Each region would operate as part of an ecosystem.

A language-model brainstorming session supplied possible sources: television, radio, social media and streaming; weather, pollution and seismic activity; road traffic, public transport, flights and shipping; live chats and translations; stock prices and cryptocurrency transactions; bodily measurements and public-health data; GPS positions, geofencing and location-based AR. It also proposed familiar applications such as data-driven stories, responsive architecture, live soundscapes and changing public murals.

Those suggestions felt too generic. Connecting a sensor or feed to an output is not enough. What would justify bringing several of these sources together?

Perhaps different parts of a canvas could combine health, finance, conversation and location. Each part might have its own QR code and mobile interface. Entering a trading interface, for example, could alter the financial region, though perhaps indirectly rather than as an immediate literal response.

But what would that interaction mean? Would the production effort exceed the conceptual value? Why collage these particular systems? What political or artistic proposition would their combination make?

I do not want a collection of feeds that merely announces that the world is complicated. I want the relations between them to produce something beyond the sum of the parts: perhaps an incomprehensible Times Square compressed into one canvas, perhaps a contemporary Broadway Boogie-Woogie.

This connects to the naked interface: an interface that does not simplify the world for convenient use, but exposes its workings without smoothing them away. The questions remain open.

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