The Beginning of Everything

In 1994 I was a Ph.D. student of the graduate school of Illinois Institute of Technology. In one class the teacher gave us a book "Einstein's Dreams" and suggested us to construct an interactive media project based on this book.

"Einstein's Dreams" was a series of fantasies about time. I applied the ideas from the book and produced an interface between words and images. Readers were able to travel between different times and stories, such as separating themselves from their own shadows or visiting the rooms with reversed causalities.

My teacher suggested me to enter the first year of new media art competition "New Voices, New Visions" with my homework. It was an event organized by Voyager and Interval Research- the former was the top new media company and the later was an R&D oriented business in Silicon Valley. The jurors of the first years were all eminent creators, they were new media artist Laurie Anderson, director Terry Gilliam, Sci-fi novelist William Gibson and cartoonist Art Spiegelman.

In addition to the award, I also won acquaintance of several people who have significant influence on me, like Bob Stein and Laurie Anderson, among others.

Although I had been working as a general art director in online game business for seven years afterward, the honor I had been given has planted seeds in my mind. In 2001 I resigned from Sony and came back to art- my beloved business.