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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-rebellion-to-the-system

System Art: Rebellion to the System

2025-04-15

How do we move from being components of a system to creating systems ourselves? This question matters increasingly as artificial intelligence takes over work organised around established procedures. Professional expertise often means learning to operate within a given structure. What becomes possible when we move beyond that structure, or across the boundaries that separate one discipline from another?

System art can describe relationships and dynamics, but I want to go further: to let audiences construct and alter systems through an exhibition. The apparently permanent order before them could reveal itself as something made, something that could have been arranged otherwise. Generating an isolated text or web component is only a beginning. The next step is to combine these components and invent the relationships through which a larger system emerges.

I imagine a vocabulary of recurring elements. Typography and live text can organise information as both language and material, as in Jenny Holzer's work. Numbers and time can acquire the persistence of On Kawara or Hanne Darboven. Independent modules can form grids whose collective behaviour exceeds any single unit. Dashboards and rankings can make comparison and competitive pressure visible. A dataset can pass through different graphs, producing different emotional and perceptual readings. Maps need not depict geography: zooming, panning, and rotating can become ways of navigating other kinds of relationships.

Images and video could move between orderly grids and the density of collage. Minimal three-dimensional forms, like those I explored in SoTA and Passage of Water, could coexist with blunt, insistent data displays. I am interested in the restraint of Donald Judd and the numerical intensity of Ryoji Ikeda, rather than the decorative reassurance of conventional infographics. Repetition, as in Warhol or Christian Marclay, offers another vocabulary: a hundred switches, sliders, buttons, clocks, media players, status indicators, or audio bars, each familiar on its own and strange in accumulation.

These modules need not follow a single progressive storyline. They could occupy discrete states, moving between them with changing probabilities. From a distance, the exhibition might resemble an ecology: many local events, no single sequence that explains everything. Code generation could make it possible to produce and recombine this vocabulary at a scale that would otherwise be difficult to manage.

The audience's phone becomes a means of changing the system, not simply selecting an option inside it. Tapping, scrolling, swinging, or using it as a percussion instrument could alter the relationships that govern the installation. Familiar gestures from games such as Temple Run or Angry Birds contain possibilities that a conventional interface often suppresses.

Nietzsche's movement from camel to lion to child offers an image for this ambition. The system that appeared above us becomes something we can play with. The question shifts from how to endure its rules to what rules we might create.

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