From the slave of the system to the master of the system.

Contextual Change

교양의 화려한 복권

Why is System Art relevant?

The system is a big simulacrum. It marks humans as slaves. We’re living in the biggest slavery ever. Slaves, doing manual jobs, and being proud of doing that manual jobs, calling it ‘professionalism’. Now those professionals will be unemployed - thanks to AI. RIP professionals. Now it’s the time not to stay in the field but to overcome the field and go vertically. System Art helps to do this.

System: A field. Inside a system human is a slave. Sometimes a happy slave.
Vertically navigating through the system: A unique capability of (free) humans. We can overcome the a priori, going beyond the existing field, and navigating vertically and freely. We no longer are bounded by the system - Ratherly, we create a system.

System art is about creating a system. It’s not only about depicting the system dynamics -- although those approaches (Hans Haacke, ANT, 니콜라 부리오) were relevant (and although none of these had ACTUALLY succeeded in depicting the system) -- It’s not about simply making the system interactive/dynamic. It’s about allowing the audience to CREATE the system, to create a bunch of systems, within an exhibition setting, right there, and acknowledge that the system they were bound to was just a simulacrum. Well, now bye-bye simulacrum. Now it’s up to us to CREATE bunches of simulacrums on our own - Yes, we are the god. And good system art delivers this role so successfully.

Contextual Change: Given the system, now user can actively & profoundly change the system’s context and thus re-create a bunch of systems in a matter of seconds. Well, we can start from obvious ‘sub-systems’ like texts, and websites, but it’s not only about these simple stuff - these texts, and sites are the ‘unit’ of the bigger system that we can optimise. As now these units are easily generatable, the matter is about combining these different units to create smth bigger - to generate its inter-relationship, to collage these units, to define new relationships, to actively generate its units, and thus re-create, re-define the system. Rebellion to the existing system. Create and redefine new systems. All are powered by contextual change.

What are our ingredients?

1. Typographical/Graph Design-oriented: Packages, Graphics, Typographies, Live changing texts. Jenny Holzer perhaps? 
2. Number aesthetic: Timer, clock, big gigantic numbers. Yes, I’m talking about On kawara. And hanne darboven.
3. Grid layouts: Notorious grids. With multiple units. All units are independent, yet holistically emerging new patterns - again, state-based approach?
4. Dashboard Visuals: lots of dashboards. Currently showing the ‘status’. ‘Ranking Society’. Viva competition! Pressure! Pressure! Pressure!
5. Data Visualisation: Plottings, line graphs, time series, dot graphs, rhizome. So much things to do, so much things to discover. Data is smth which we can feel - data emotionalisation. So many way to plot the same thing. How will user change/alter the dataset? Ups and downs. And booms! Always combine graphs with different visual states! Jolly data visualisation. Strict data visualisation. Dynamic magic data visualisation.
6. Map. Abstractive Map. Again, so many things to explore. Or also, how to design a mobile interface -- which interacts the as same asa  map (zoom, pan, rotate) -- but not a map? 3D Interface? Smth more? Sm kind of a speculative interface?
7. Image/Video Collage - Classic. Grid layout vs. Chaotic Layout? Time to go back to Basquiat?
8. Brutal Three.js → No descriptive scene, but minimalistic/brutal three.js - just like sota, just like pow grace. Squares. Items. 
9. Brutal Data: Sort of data vis, related to three.js - but brutal. No additional layer. Just shows data brutally. Anti-infographics. Anti-decorations. Sort of like Ryoji-Ikeda? Pretty much, but more brutal, better, interactive, and semantic. Reference to Judd perhaps?
10. Marclayian: Christian Marclay - Clock, War Videos, Telephone. Repetition, exaggeration of user interfaces/outputs. Grid, line/axis layout. Multiple sliders. 100 Elevators. 100 Light switches. 100 Togglers. 100 Sliders. 100 Buttons. 100 Text Input. 100 Rotators. 100 Hamburger Buttons. 100 Alarm Clocks. 100 Watches. 100 Players. 100 Status bars. 100 Audio bars. 100 Selectors. 100 Plus buttons. Amplify. Amplify. AMPLIFY UI ELEMENTS. BE MARCLAYIAN. BE WARHOLISTIC. 
11. State-based approach & Markov Chains: No more progressive storytelling. Just a state-based approach. 100 different states. Moving across as Markov chain: time-dependent weight. All providing a sort of ecological view from bird’s eye pov -- What a multi-device web artwork!

Automation aesthetic: Now we’re auto-generating the automated system. Automated aesthetic - the feel of aesthetic when you ask GPT and they generate a million lines of code - is the aesthetic of the contemporary. This aesthetic will emerge a lot, but system art will capture its very essence.

PLAY: Play in a Nietzschean sense. You are no longer a camel: You are no longer a lion: You are a baby. Thus you play. You play with your mobile, you play with your digital device - you play with your instrument. Now mobile phone is a percussion instrument. You play, you tap on it, you touch, you scroll through, you swing through, and thus the output system is amplified, adjusted, transformed, reacting, and its mechanism is no longer the same as before. You play with your phone, and the output - the surroundings, the system, the notorious system, which seemed first like it’s controlling you, and which it seemed like it will always superior you - is smth that you just play with now. You play, you torture, you exemplify, you tilt until the very end. Remember Temple Run. Remember Angry Bird. Those touches are embedded under the visual screen.