Kansa Amida!

Update: pictures are showing up all around Flickr

We had a blast with four great speakers and 180 participants showing up yesterday at the Yurim Art Hall then at the Asahi Orien to participate to our first Asian event. The logistics went well thanks to our friends at Mecenat Korea, then the room started to fill and the show was on, Adam opening the ceremony with a great talk about how cities are now becoming read/write environments rather than desocialized zones with everybody isolated in a tech bubble (iPod, mobile phone). Then Bruce took the stage and showed his vision of a spime-based economy, where objects don't have any value (they can be build on demand and in seconds by 3D printing machines) but the history of relations between producers and consumers becomes the key.

Then Jake Song - a very famous yet humble and open Korean programmer - shared his long experience of building online worlds, first in 2D (Lineage, Ultima Online) then in 3D (Lineage 2, World of Warcraft). His talk resembled a how-to build the perfect virtual world, and my favorite slide was the one that said "try to build a weird enough world so users feel like they are somewhere else, but simple enough that people can still use common sense".

Yoo Suk Yeon closed the organized part of the day by showing what she was doing as both an architect and a researcher, trying to build physical spaces for a population that is getting more and more connected and virtual everyday. She had the most beautiful and intriguing slides I have seen in a while (we will try to post all the slides as soon as possible) and I will take a closer look at all that as soon as I get my hands on the powerpoint file.

We then decided to cancel the formal questions, and proposed all the participants to start the discussion around a beer rather than at the hall. We had swiss cheese, dry meat and cold beer waiting for us at the Asahi Orien where the chatters started in almost every corner. Close to 150 persons were still with us at that time, among the diverse crowd you could see DJ Spooky (who had a performance in Seoul and was around) have a drink with Bruce Sterling and Jasmina Tesanovic, some people finally getting a chance to chat with the guy who made the game they played for years, people exchanging business cards, bloggers meeting they fellow writers they never had a chance to see in real life. Overall people seemed to be happy about the event and we were too.

It was an amazing night where we all met a countless number of people, got tons of ideas and suggestions, learned how to run an event in Korea, and finally got to meet the community of Asian movers and shakers living in Seoul. Thanks to all those who made the event possible, the LIFT team, Jaewoong, the folks at Daum and Mecenat Korea, our friends at Bread and Butter and all those who came with to participate and engage in a conversation about technology's impact on our society.