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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 system-art-contextual-switch-generatable-automatic-systems

System Art: Contextual Switch (Generatable Automatic Systems)

2025-02-18

A system artwork can be considered as a graph of states and relationships. Input modalities enter a system, G(V, E), and emerge as outputs distributed across channels.

Some parts of that graph may be modular. A subgraph can be replaced while the surrounding structure remains operational. I am interested in this as a contextual switch: a new context enters an existing mechanism and produces a new system instance. Graph transformation offers a possible technical reference; one source to investigate is Grzegorz Rozenberg’s Handbook of Graph Grammars and Computing by Graph Transformation (1997).

Generative-X and Generative Simulacra could work this way. The participant supplies a context, which combines with a reusable mechanism to generate a website, exhibition or another organised world. The same idea might extend beyond context to a change of modality or spatiotemporal structure.

There is a resemblance to Warhol’s soup cans. Change the flavour while preserving the recognisable system of the can. In the present case, however, what is reproduced can itself operate and change over time.

Several examples clarify the pattern: a theme passes through a curatorial apparatus and becomes a biennale; a topic enters the tone and conventions of self-help writing and becomes a book; a neural-network model passes through SoTA’s construction rules and becomes an architecture. In WALL-E, the injunction to ‘try blue’ passes through advertising and a compliant interface until everyone wears blue.

The same pattern appears when a new buzzword—AI, quantum—spreads through books, news and exhibitions. In Orwell’s 1984, a changed enemy or political narrative passes through ministries, media, censorship and rewritten records to produce a changed public reality.

A conceptual artwork could begin with one word and generate not three representations, as in One and Three Chairs, but hundreds of images, videos, texts and interfaces. More interestingly, it could generate a connected system around that word. The representations would acquire their meaning from the machinery that produces them, increasingly detached from the original context.

Other examples are less immediately visual. Financial bubbles repeatedly take on different subjects—tulips, property, dot-com companies, AI—while familiar relations of expectation and speculation recur. Educational fashions pass through teachers, curricula, assessments, funding and incentives. Design trends circulate among agencies, clients, media and labour. Their outputs change while important parts of the mechanism remain.

A model’s familiar examples of parametric architecture and seeded algorithmic art help describe the output side, but my interest is in the analogous organisation of society. The system is not simply a means of producing a visual. It is the subject.

The interaction could begin with careful choices. A participant selects a context because it matters to them. As the speed and responsiveness of generation become pleasurable, they may begin switching contexts casually, randomly, simply to feel the power of producing another system. That shift exposes how lightly apparently serious meanings can be exchanged.

A shopping cart could give this a particularly pointed form. The participant shops for contexts, themes and buzzwords. A grave subject becomes an item to select, combine and replace. The lightness of shopping should meet the heaviest material possible. Shop the signifier. Shoplift the signifier.

Reference retained from the original notes: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_xToQ4cIHkk

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