# System Art: Rebellion to the System

Canonical URL: https://jeanyoon.ch/oi/texts/system-art-rebellion-to-the-system
Type: essay / research note
Author: Jeanyoon Choi (최정윤)
Date: 2025-04-15

## Summary

Jeanyoon Choi asks how people can move from being components of systems to creating them, as AI takes over procedural professional work. He wants exhibitions in which audiences construct and alter systems, revealing an apparently permanent order as made. He outlines a vocabulary of modules drawing on Jenny Holzer, On Kawara, Hanne Darboven, Donald Judd, Ryoji Ikeda, Warhol and Christian Marclay, along with dashboards, rankings, maps and the minimal 3D forms he explored in SoTA and Passage of Water, recombined through code generation and changed via phone gestures. Nietzsche's camel, lion and child frame the ambition.

## 요약 (Korean)

최정윤은 AI가 절차적 전문 업무를 대체하는 시대에 시스템의 부품에서 시스템의 창조자로 나아가야 한다고 보며, 관객이 휴대폰으로 모듈화된 설치의 관계를 직접 구성·변경하는 System Art를 제안한다.

## Questions this answers

### What is Jeanyoon Choi's essay 'System Art: Rebellion to the System' about?

It argues that as AI absorbs procedural expertise, people should move from operating within systems to creating them, and proposes exhibitions where audiences use their phones to construct and alter the relationships of a modular installation.

### Which artists inform Jeanyoon Choi's visual vocabulary for system art?

The essay cites Jenny Holzer for live text, On Kawara and Hanne Darboven for numbers and time, Donald Judd and Ryoji Ikeda for restraint and numerical intensity, and Warhol and Christian Marclay for repetition.

Topics: system art, automation, modular installation, code generation, data display, repetition, audience participation

References: [Jenny Holzer](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jenny_Holzer), [On Kawara](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/On_Kawara), [Hanne Darboven](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hanne_Darboven), [Donald Judd](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Donald_Judd), [Ryoji Ikeda](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ryoji_Ikeda), [Andy Warhol](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andy_Warhol), [Christian Marclay](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christian_Marclay), [Friedrich Nietzsche](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Friedrich_Nietzsche), [Temple Run](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Temple_Run), [Angry Birds](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Angry_Birds), SoTA, Passage of Water

## Full text

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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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.