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Essay: 10 Years from now
ICM: Shawn Van Every

Youjeong, Paik
ICM: Shawn Van Every

I am on an airplane on the way to my home to South Korea to give a lecture at the graduate school I attended before NYU. I think my job is fabulous because I teach students in a research university during the spring semester in Korea and I work for an interactive media company as an artist and consultant as well during the rest of the year. I am going across the Pacific Ocean now and I can feel that I’m getting closer to my home country.

Technology has developed a lot in the past 10 years and generally all people are embracing and using new technologies as well. I have a 3.5” notebook which looks like a normal business card about 3.5W” x 2H”x 1D”. My computer has 100 Tera-bytes of memory and storage space and multiple CPUs. This computer is very small and compact, but it only has enough memory to extend its’ monitor space to about 5 monitors wide. This is much better then the 21”monitor we used to use and it complements my multi- tasking work style by the way of virtual reality technology. Another feature I have on this computer is that I don’t have to have backup devices anymore, there is fault tolerance and redundancy built into the computer so it never crashes and data is never lost. 10 years ago many people used 12” or 13” screen laptops. I can remember that I brought my 13” laptop every day to NYU during my ITP days. Back then I was carrying a few backpacks with me as well and I remember it being very tiring at that times. However, now I am carrying a small wallet or a small handbag about the size of a sandwich. It has everything, books, writing utensils, etc. this wallet has everything I need including a computer. This is a big difference from 10 years ago today (10 years later). Nowadays there are no comparable problems to 10 years ago in using technology. People are no longer ignorant to technology and they use all kinds of technology freely as a part of their every day lives. It is something of a perfect “technology integration,” people and technology working together in harmony with each other, working flawlessly together, depending and working as one.

10 years ago at Tisch (ITP), I wrote a 5 pages paper in Red Burns’s class, “Applications.” My paper was about uniqueness and originality of what I saw during an M5 but trip along the transit route in NYC. I came up with some ideas while I was sightseeing in the bus. Fortunately for me I discovered some interesting scenery that was reflecting off of the building’s surfaces (or facade). I could see that the materials that the buildings were made of many different materials such as glasses, granite, plastics, and even people’s sun glasses. All of these materials were reflecting images of each other and showing themselves (parts of buildings) reflecting off of other buildings or each other. The buildings were hit by both natural lighting like sun-light and artificial lighting and creating a sort of projection on each other’s surfaces. They buildings stood in harmony as they reflected and projected images of each other. I saw many different layers of light, colors, and images, and it all seemed like they were doing some type of interaction with each other. While I was on the bus, those images of buildings, lights, and colors were scrolling by reflecting each other as the bus moved up the street. It was like Manhattan’s everyday movie done not intentionally, but naturally. After my observation and writing my paper for the class, I tried to apply this observation to my PCOM project. It was so successful that I developed my idea with another technology. This new idea was realized by Interactive Human Media Corp. which I now work for as a consultant, and I became famous because of this idea that I had at ITP while I was touring on the bus.

The idea that made me famous is my contribution of two things to this new technology. The first one is my application of alternative monitor technologies or visual imaging across different materials. The second idea is of image projection. My ideas are not complicating, it is the ability for a projection to be able to traverse itself on many types of surfaces such as a light colored wall, glass, wood, or simply just space. I contributed ways of controlling color values such as RGB, CMYK, and HUE to project images via small lenses built into the laptop over wide areas that does not have very good reflective properties. The images projected can span over many materials or multiple materials. There are definitely no limits to how many monitors you can have as long as you have the surface area that the projection can reach.

Technology has gone beyond what it was 10 years ago and I really don’t know what direction new technologies will move towards. We live in a Sci-fi type of world as we’ve always imagined it on books and movies. I am in a dilemma these days, does new technologies really make people more efficient, productive, and convenient? I don’t know, maybe sometimes I don’t’ think it does. I am afraid that 10 years in the future, in the next generation of technologies to come, and technologies might be so advanced that they might harm human life. Artificial things might dominate natural things. Ironically, I am in the state-of-the-arts business, but I am really afraid of our future. I feel a little bit cold now. I think I need to set the temperature a little bit higher in my jacket. One more thing different from 10 years ago is that people don’t try to have relationship with other people. It seems like they prefer to have a relationship with machines or computers. I am seriously thinking that I should consider joining a think-tank or a consortium about advances in technologies. Maybe I will do this after I retire, 10 years from now.