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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-the-elephant-and-the-blind

System Art: The Elephant and the Blind

2025-02-17

We live within systems that exceed our understanding, but we repeatedly mistake an observable symptom for the dynamics of the whole. The elephant and the blind people remains a useful image: each encounter is real, yet none is complete.

Even sophisticated data analysis can deepen this mistake if it treats the available measurements as the whole system. We solve the problem we can see, then discover consequences elsewhere or later. A local solution becomes another part of a larger problem.

I want to make the relationship between a system and its symptoms perceptible. A multi-device artwork can operate an underlying system while its screens display only particular manifestations. The algorithm is not fully visible. The participant senses that something larger connects the fragments without being given the entire elephant.

Those fragments need not look like conventional data visualisation. They could take the form of graphs, grids, dashboards, tables or stock-market displays; diagrams of relationships; advertisements, booking interfaces, shops, business cards and logos; generated images and videos distributed in two or three dimensions; typography and streams of text; repeated small multiples; clocks; avatars and agent profiles; maps and geographical plots.

I see four broad ways for a participant to enter such a system.

1. Control it. An action changes its parameters or dynamics. A small interest-rate adjustment could have amplified effects across several screens. A command could propagate through a bureaucratic hierarchy. The challenge is to make the action meaningful and engaging rather than simply provide a control panel.

2. Navigate it. The system already operates and evolves. The participant encounters different perspectives, perhaps as in a historical archive. A text request could generate a view of a particular part without changing the underlying system. Here the aesthetic of autonomous operation matters.

3. Become part of it. An avatar or agent enters a competitive or cooperative field. Mobile Jockey suggests one possibility, but I also want to explore what participation means with only one to five visitors in a physical installation.

4. Encounter unexpected consequences. An action succeeds nearby but creates a problem elsewhere. In Room A, someone achieves a local goal while producing a negative effect in Room B; Room B’s response in turn harms Room A. Both work hard and the system goes nowhere. Competition, ecological damage and zero-sum structures can be approached through this spatial relation.

The same structure can operate through time: a desirable immediate result carries delayed costs. Distance and delay become ways to experience the limits of a local viewpoint.

A further question is whether AI could generate some of the system itself: its inputs, parameters and relationships. That would require thinking about the graph, not merely generating new material for the screens.

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