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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-dynamics-depciting-the-ecosystem-as-multi-device-web-artwork-mdwa

System Dynamics | Depciting the Ecosystem as Multi-Device Web Artwork (MDWA)

2024-09-25

The direction I want for multi-device web artwork is a living ecosystem. Connections between devices should form an organism: a system that generates and changes in real time through its own dynamics. Each device becomes an agent or node, and each connection participates in the relations between them.

This calls for a structural understanding of system dynamics, modelling and graph theory. It moves beyond story-based worldbuilding towards system-building and ecology-building.

Much of my earlier MDWA thinking concerned immersion within a single space: how an action on a phone changes the surrounding screens. That remains important, but it may not be enough to explain why the work needs multiple devices as a distinct medium. I think of this as a first-generation discussion of inter-device immersion and embedded reality.

A second-generation discussion asks what multiplicity does structurally. It also allows the work to extend beyond one room and beyond the white cube. The devices can be distributed, while the system continues to exist through their relations.

Here the work is an organism continually forming and dissolving. Its agents do not determine themselves independently; their conditions emerge through exchanges with others. The artwork makes a system’s dynamics available to experience, even though no single view contains the whole.

As the world becomes more complex, we often mistake our partial encounter for a complete account, like the blind people touching different parts of an elephant. Art can make perceptible the fact that our world is entangled rather than a collection of cleanly separated, static concepts. MDWA is particularly suited to that task.

The practical sequence could be: model aspects of a worldly system through system dynamics; express the model as nodes and relationships; map nodes to devices and relationships to inter-device connections. The model is not the world itself, but an attempt to construct an encounter with its relations.

My proposals for an AI system modelled on financial markets and for a ranking society already point in this direction. In the latter, each device could act as a virtual identity within a shared ranking system. But I want to go beyond familiar examples towards genuinely distributed system-building.

The frontend–backend distinction becomes useful here. A participant initially encounters a refined, tailored fragment and takes it for the work. Later they discover that this frontend belongs to a much larger, interconnected backend: a continuously changing formation that exceeds what any one interface can present.

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