Browser Flatland: Worlds, Words, and the Work of Exploring Maintenance

Yirang Ok is a designer, creative coder and researcher working across books, the web, servers and archives. The work starts in the small gaps of systems that look neutral (a shelf order, an index, a keyboard), asks who they leave out, and builds shared tools for another order.

Thesis: World, Words, Work: Archive Sovereignty ↗

Website · withok.kr Instagram · @with_ok_Email · contact@withok.kr

Why do we keep adapting to technology’s rules?

Workshop design and facilitation, and KRthree.js development: Yirang Ok.

Scenes from Coding in Korean and No Mouse No Keyboard No Problem, Seoul, 2026.

Browser Flatland explores the often invisible work that keeps technology usable: learning unfamiliar tools, translating between languages, and adjusting to systems we inherit. Drawing on Yirang Ok’s experience as a Korean web developer, it asks why users are expected to adapt to established technical standards, and how they might gain the agency to question them.

Ok designed two workshops in Korea to explore this question with others. Coding in Korean works with three.js through KRthree.js, a Korean-language layer; No Mouse No Keyboard No Problem removes familiar input devices. Participants experimented, encountered failures, and exchanged ways of working. The videos, code, photographs, and participant projects gathered here trace an ongoing inquiry into how people can question and renegotiate technological conventions together.

Watch Browser Flatland

2026 · 8 min 5 sec

01 — Coding in Korean

What changes when code speaks your language?

At Hup Geumho, seven participants built online 3D libraries using KRthree.js, a Korean-language layer over three.js. Most wrote their first JavaScript here. Across four sessions, they photographed and scanned objects, assembled collections in the browser, and gave each library its own web address.

Working through code together at Hup Geumho.

Exploring 3D geometry during the Coding in Korean workshop.

A tour of the participants' online 3D libraries, made during Coding in Korean.

Myeongseo Kang's library of books about comics.

Hup Geumho, Seoul · July–August 2026. Explore the workshop and participants' libraries.

02 — No Mouse No Keyboard No Problem

What happens when the usual controls disappear?

Participants put the keyboard and mouse aside and built eight alternative input tools using sensors, cameras, sound, and foot pads. A throttle scrolled Instagram, several people shared one cursor, and a foot pad was used to browse Pinterest. Each experiment asks who defines a familiar interaction, and who must do the work of adapting to it.

Participants gather around the workshop table at Yeongwon.

Eight experiments in using the web without a mouse or keyboard.

Sensors and electronic modules used during the workshop.

Code Club × Yeongwon, Seoul · 27 July and 3 August 2026. See the eight experiments.

Both workshops met on one web board, Summer Collaborations. Workshop outlines, weekly plans, participants’ notes, and their results sit there as coloured blocks that anyone could add, connect, and group. With the summer over, the board is now read-only.

Summer Collaborations, the shared web board of both workshops.

Maintenance runs through both workshops as the work of learning, translating, and adapting. The linked code, workshop materials, and daily logs keep this process available for others to revisit and discuss.

Keep exploring

Workshop materials and daily logs · More work by Yirang Ok · DAE Graduation Show project

Credits: Workshop design, facilitation, and KRthree.js development: Yirang Ok. Documentation support: Dachan. In collaboration with HUP, House Youngwon, and Code Club, with Hwanjun and Jungho as project hosts. The libraries and input devices were made by the workshop participants; individual projects and credits are linked above.

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