User:Youjung/T2 Assessment

Why XPUB?

First day at XPUB!

Before XPUB, I worked as a brand designer for premium grocery delivery platform. It was one of the domains that I wanted to work for because I loved browsing through the curated feed of groceries. And the service was undeniably convenient. If you order before 23:00, you get your product at 6:00.

However, working there made me realise what sustains convenience and abundant content. Deliverers were being worn down and multiple teams were constantly manufacturing content without much intention. We were required to standardize and optimize our work. One example was building company's CMS to manage online content more efficiently. I felt powerless using this tool and within this structure. I was making a lot of things public but most of them felt meaningless. So I started learning code to break free from this form.

I wanted to create something interactive and playful, not only in its outcome, but also in the way it is made. XPUB was a completely different environment from where I had worked before, but it felt like the right place to unlearn. After seven months at XPUB, I feel happier than ever!

What did you make?

Overview

Type	Count	Name
Website	3	Cooking Spam e-mails, A mazing machines, Our Digital Home, SI29 Intro Website
Interactive Installation	2	A story in a story in a story, Poetry Generater at CCU
Zine	3	A mazing machines, Tangled Thoughts, Practice and Scalability
Workshop	1	Our Digital Home
Radio Show	2	Radio Ghost, Cyber Feminism

October 2025
Python Poetry

Poetry Generator

Extending from Fermenting the Earth workshop at iMAL, part of the participants gathered to make a growing poetry run by the electricity derived from the mud batteries we made. People interacting with the generator chooses different actions: WAIT, FERMENT, GAZE, HEAR or SNIFF and based on this action a different python script is executed. The input texts are conversations and texts we read during the workshop and the script transforms them into phrases of poems.

Notes: I got the initial idea from text adventure games and Eliza. I liked the fact that the audience can explore beyond the screen, engaging with tangible entities such as plants and printers. However, using actual electricity from these mud batteries would take a lot of time. This became an entry point into permacomputing, leading me to rethink notions of time, electricity, avoiding human centered approaches.

October 2025
Python, Website

Cooking Spam Emails

During our first radio show, I read a strange e-mail from ABN AMRO. I created a Python script that splits each phrase from the email and randomly recombines them into different contexts. An editor working at ABN AMRO must have spent considerable time crafting each sentence. Rather moving it to trash, I chopped the sentences into phrases and repurposed it, like cooking. After the radio show, I built a website that displays these randomly generated e-mails.

Notes: Inspired by Nick Montfort's computational poetry and Uncreative Writing, this project extends the approach I took in the Poetry Generator. It uses code to break down and recombine language, creating new meanings from existing material. What fascinates me was how each reader can interpret the same results differently. During development, I discovered that running Python directly in a browser isn't easy, so I converted into Javascript.

November 2025
Python, Game, Pen Plotter

A story in a story in a story

This project is an interactive narrative that lets you explore, gather and plot using a pen plotter. Wander around in the virtual environment, pick up what you resonate with and that is what you take with you at the end of the day and becomes a tiny part of you. This game was inspired by The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction by Ursula K. Le Guin, in which the main action is not combat but gathering.

Notes: Instead of seamless experience, the game embraces constraints(limited terminal command, slow loading time to plot) and this reflects on intentional gathering. Rather than having a linear narrative or statement, it focuses on the journey and act of gathering. During the development, I worried about the lack a concrete message, as I was mainly driven by playing around with the pen plotter. Marloes's feedback, asking why it is fun and taking fun seriously, helped me move past this doubt. During the event, it was fascinating to see how audiences reacted to the pen plotter and how delighted they were to take home the printed output. This project was meaningful, as it was my first time creating an interactive and tangible experience.

[Work in Progress]

[Event at UBIK]

November 2025
Website, Zine

SI28: A mazing machines Website & Zine

Landing page design and development for Special Issue 29 website. I used LeaderLine to make interactive diagram. Also worked on the master css template for our publication using weasyprint.

Notes: This was my first time coding collectively. We encountered merge conflicts multiple times and needed time to figure out how to work together. Rather than relying on LLMs, I focused on writing and understanding each line of code myself to build a more solid outcome. Learning a hacky way to create a zine using a wiki and bash scripts was especially engaging, and the process itself felt deeply collective.

March 2025
Zine, Illustration

Tangled Thoughts

During the winter break, I spent time drawing. Drawing is a way for me to vent my thoughts and escape from overthinking. I collected some of the drawings and compiled them into a zine using paged.js. This project was presented during the Xtraterrestrial zine fair.

Notes: This project was an attempt to merge my drawing practice with what I’ve been learning at XPUB. I included the CSS code on the back of the zine; this created an interesting contrast between analog and digital methods. I’m still exploring how to integrate drawing and coding. I think they do share a crafty approach in common, but I haven't yet found a clear way to connect them.

March 2025
Python, Website, Workshop

Our Digital Home

Using "home" as a metaphor for servers, this workshop explored where our files live and who controls them. Participants uploaded images and text files into a shared “home”, following a social protocol structured around rooms such as the entrance, bedroom, kitchen, and garden. Using FTP like FileZilla or Serverbox, we collectively populated the space, which was later revealed to be hosted on a Raspberry Pi rather than an abstract cloud. We introduced traceroute and peer-to-peer connections to unpack the materiality of the cloud.

Notes: My role was making the visuals and a dynamic website using Jinja. A Python script regenerated the HTML from the home directory every five seconds, allowing the site to continuously update as new files were added, creating a shared, growing space in real time. Through this project, I learned that social practice is just as important as prototyping, as it fosters more meaningful conversations. It also sparked my interest in exploring communal servers and how they can be collectively maintained.

What did you learn?

During the two tri-mester, I learned...

How to work together

• Finding solution and gathering ideas are more fun together
• How to listen and accept and when to stand by my opinion.
• Importance of documentation not only for myself but also for others

How to proceed without overthinking

• Rapid prototyping and public sharing (Sergio lowers the barrier to making things public)
• Embracing open-ended exploration instead of seeking solutions
• Taking fun and daydreaming seriously

How to be critical

• Escaping techno-solutionism
• Questioning familiar tools and linear narratives
• Embracing clunkiness
• Unlearning

What is your research interests?

These are my future research interests...

Platforms and Digital Culture
It is difficult to resist the dopamine of e-commerce and social media platforms, yet constantly being on them is also exhausting. Beneath their seamless interface lie layers of obscured complexity and deception. Reading The Californian Ideology helped me understand the origins of the digital agora and its initial intentions to create a better world. However, over time, it has evolved in ways that reveal downsides. In This Together, a documentary exposes the problem of Uber driver's freelance status, shows how platform policies not only bind workers’ lives to the platform and deteriorate working environment dehumanizing them, but also deepen social inequality and discrimination. Watching this made me realize how much injustice can be hidden behind convenience. In the upcoming semester, I would like to explore how platform culture shapes social structures, and to think about how to bring them to the surface.

Communal Servers
Having a communal server enables freedom to prototype and publish more easily. In contrast, working with a company managed server like Google Drive, where access is controlled through permissions and hierarchy, highlighted how it affects the willingness to create something and gives a sense of lethargy. Within Sergio, we support one another and collectively maintain the space, and this is a very warm and meaningful experience. From this experience, together with Tommi and Holly, we have started building our own communal server. I would like to explore how to establish social protocols that support collaboration without becoming restrictive and how such space can be evolved over time.

Analog Drawings and Digitization
Drawing has always been an important part of my practice, and using a pen plotter for our first special issue reflected that. However, I am not interested in producing drawings through machines, prompts, or on digital interfaces. I want to maintain a crafty, hand-drawn approach while exploring how these drawings can be translated into digital form. I would like to find ways to connect drawing with what I am learning in XPUB. One possible direction would be to experiment with scanners, perhaps opening them up and exploring their drivers to intervene in the process of digitization.

Any Doubts?

Vibe coding at XPUB

These days, everyone seems to be “vibe coding.” While LLMs raise ethical concerns and obscure many layers of the development process, they remain practical tools for rapid prototyping. Within XPUB, however, there is a sense of shaming(?) around using these tools. At the same time, for students with limited technical experience, they make it possible to quickly produce outcomes that would otherwise be difficult to achieve. In prototyping class we are encouraged to make things quickly, the next day during methods class we are challenged to criticize. So I end up secretly using AI...

I don't know if I want to resist

Although I am here to gain critical insights, XPUB still feels like an island. Sometimes it feels like a sin to comply to existing systems. Especially on AI, these tools help me support my studies and enable accessing information more efficiently. When it comes to resisting capitalist systems and bureaucracy, I find myself in a complicated position. As a non-EU student, I have to comply in order to be here. Studying here requires extensive documents, funds to prove myself. I am constantly categorized and standardized as a "foreigner" within this structure, which creates dissonance with what I am learning at XPUB.

I do not complain because I chose to be here. However, within this reality, time is money and it's running out fast. Slowing down or resisting feels like a luxury I cannot afford. While XPUB places strong emphasis on resistance, I find myself wondering if there is also space to find negotiation within existing system?