# Banpo-Xism

Canonical URL: https://www.xdlab.net/projects/banpo-xism
Artwork identifier: https://www.xdlab.net/projects/banpo-xism#work
Artwork names: Banpo-Xism; 반포자이즘; Banpo Xism; Banpoxism; 반포 자이즘; 반포-자이즘
Korean title: 반포자이즘
Year: 2026
Artwork creators: Jeanyoon Choi
Medium: Multi-Device Web Artwork (1 Media Wall, 3 TVs, Multiple Audiences' Mobiles)
Exhibition / venue: <Living Geometry>

## Artwork

<Banpo-Xism> (반포자이즘) addresses South Korea’s apartment culture as a contemporary myth in which location and brand operate as coordinates of wealth, status, and aspiration. The work translates this myth into a multi-device web artwork in which audience mobile phones are synchronized with surrounding screens. Audiences first scroll through an SNS-like feed of fictional apartment complexes arranged by location and brand. Each scroll updates the surrounding screens as a step toward higher coordinates, while remaining confined to a flat apartment plane. Later, mobile interactions collectively deform this field into higher-dimensional geometric forms, shifting coordinates, prices, and textual hierarchies across the installation. Thus, <Banpo-Xism> makes social myth visible as a coordinate system audiences enter, perform, and destabilize.

The Republic of Korea is the “Republic of Apartments” (Valérie Gelézeau). With 53.9% of households living in apartments, apartments are no longer simply housing; they are objects of aspiration, speculation, and fetishised value. Complexes such as Banpo-Xi and Apgujeong-Hyundai, worth up to KRW 10 billion (USD 7 million), are symbols of status and aspiration. This post-consumerist obsession with prime districts (Banpo, Apgujeong) and apartment brands (Xi, Hyundai) recalls Baudrillard’s minimum marginal difference: tiny distinctions within a standardised concrete city, where what an apartment’s location-brand signifies matters more than the apartment itself.
Banpo-Xism (반포자이즘), a term coined by the artists, names this contemporary Korean social thread: a blind, zero-sum competition toward the same idealised real-estate coordinate of location (L) and brand (B). Within this L-B plane, people compare, compete, and pursue higher coordinates. This recalls Abbott’s satirical novella <Flatland>, in which two-dimensional beings mistake their plane for reality, unable to imagine dimensions beyond it. From a higher-dimensional view, however, Flatland’s laws appear narrow, arbitrary, and almost absurd. <Banpo-Xism> experiments with a similar proposition: Banpo-Xi, the apparent ultimate coordinate of success, may be only a flattened projection of a larger higher-dimensional field.
Through iterative mathematical, geometric, and interaction trials, the artists designed the following system: <Banpo-Xism> begins on a two-dimensional L-B plane containing 19 x 19 apartment complexes. Lower-value complexes occupy the bottom-left, while Banpo-Xi sits at the upper-right, with prices ranked according to each apartment’s L/B position. Audience members enter a custom mobile web app, beginning with an Instagram-like vertical feed: a synthetic real-estate social-media world of fictional apartment posts and status-anxious comments such as, “Honestly, people’s faces change when I say I live in Banpo-Xi.” As they doom-scroll, their (L, B) coordinate moves upward. The same movement is updated in real time on surrounding screens, where multiple audience members appear at once, blindly competing to reach the upper-right.
Yet the moment they click an advertisement, “Enter a higher-dimensional world,” they slip out of the two-dimensional plane. Each link reveals a hidden variable beyond L/B, opening an adjustable dimension. As these dimensions are adjusted, the flat apartment plane begins to fold, spin, scatter, and come alive as a differentiable manifold. By touching, shaking, and shouting into their phones, audience members turn hidden constants into interactive parameters, adding dimensions and deforming the field of apartments.
Drawing on differential geometry, <Banpo-Xism> gives mathematical form to a world beyond the flatness of the L-B plane. As the manifold is projected back onto the L-B coordinate, apartment prices fluctuate, revealing Banpo-Xism’s hierarchy as a lower-dimensional projection of a higher-dimensional value system.
Through this structure, <Banpo-Xism> translates a contemporary social thread into an interactive experiment built from technical and mathematical strands. The artists engineered 94,285 lines of custom JavaScript over six months, iteratively testing, editing, and fine-tuning its visual, systemic, and interactive behaviours. This customised software invites audiences to experience, manipulate, and imagine a higher-dimensional world beyond the post-consumerist values of location and brand. 
<Banpo-Xism> was exhibited at <Living Geometry> exhbiition in YDP Art Square, and engaged with about 2,000 audiences interacting directly from their mobiles.

## 한국어 작품 설명

〈반포자이즘〉은 최정윤의 2026년 다중 기기 웹 작품이다. 한국의 아파트 문화를 위치와 브랜드의 좌표계로 드러내며, 관람객의 휴대전화와 전시장 화면을 실시간으로 연결한다. 관람객은 아파트 피드를 스크롤하다가 서로 다른 모바일 인터랙션으로 평면을 고차원 형태로 변형한다. 미분기하학과 『플랫랜드』를 통해 부동산의 가치와 위계가 구성되는 방식을 탐구한다.

## Research concepts

- [multi-device web artwork · 멀티디바이스 웹아트](https://www.xdlab.net/projects#concept-multi-device-web-art)
- [Korean web art research · 한국 웹아트 연구](https://www.xdlab.net/projects#concept-korean-web-art)

## Artwork video

- [Banpo-Xism video](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1tA1aEc7Ato)
- [Embedded player](https://www.youtube.com/embed/1tA1aEc7Ato)
- [Video thumbnail](https://i.ytimg.com/vi/1tA1aEc7Ato/maxresdefault.jpg)

## Artwork images

- [Banpo-Xism — image 1 of 13](https://www.xdlab.net/projects-optimized/11/1-1920.webp)
- [Banpo-Xism — image 2 of 13](https://www.xdlab.net/projects-optimized/11/2-1920.webp)
- [Banpo-Xism — image 3 of 13](https://www.xdlab.net/projects-optimized/11/3-1920.webp)
- [Banpo-Xism — image 4 of 13](https://www.xdlab.net/projects-optimized/11/4-1920.webp)
- [Banpo-Xism — image 5 of 13](https://www.xdlab.net/projects-optimized/11/5-1920.webp)
- [Banpo-Xism — image 6 of 13](https://www.xdlab.net/projects-optimized/11/6-1920.webp)
- [Banpo-Xism — image 7 of 13](https://www.xdlab.net/projects-optimized/11/7-1920.webp)
- [Banpo-Xism — image 8 of 13](https://www.xdlab.net/projects-optimized/11/8-1920.webp)
- [Banpo-Xism — image 9 of 13](https://www.xdlab.net/projects-optimized/11/9-1920.webp)
- [Banpo-Xism — image 10 of 13](https://www.xdlab.net/projects-optimized/11/10-1920.webp)
- [Banpo-Xism — image 11 of 13](https://www.xdlab.net/projects-optimized/11/11-1920.webp)
- [Banpo-Xism — image 12 of 13](https://www.xdlab.net/projects-optimized/11/12-1920.webp)
- [Banpo-Xism — image 13 of 13](https://www.xdlab.net/projects-optimized/11/13-1920.webp)

## Official sources

- https://banpo-xism.vercel.app/