...yung nakita naming robots kanina, except for one who just got back from a junket in singapore. said jetlagged robot's name is HUBO (human + robo) and he speaks with an american accent. funnily enough, he only understands commands in korean, and can only answer in english. HUBO was an honored guest at a recent CNN special on future technologies. nitpicky me noticed slight lapses in the robot's grammar. but it was still really really cool. which you can't really say about them call center flunkies, give or take a few exceptions.
we spent the day at KAIST (Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology), a sprawling campus in daejeon city, 50 mins by express train from seoul. it's where they grow science nerds here in korea, their MIT of sorts.
it's very competitive there, only half the graduates of top science high schools here make the cut. the science high schools already are hard to get into; only 30 students per level. so most KAIST fresh meat are 16 or 17 years old, very young by korean standards because most kids here enter college at 19 or 20. so those bespectacled little geniuses we saw tooling around in cool-but-dorky bicycles should actually still be in middle school but breezed through high school in 1.5 years. at KAIST, says our guide, they never have vacations. no sem breaks!!! no wonder there were all these crazy installations all over the campus.* mass nervous breakdown, anyone?
HUBO is only one of many robots being developed at KAIST, and they all have their special talents. we took photos of ourselves with the little darlings, of course. actually, the other writers took photos while i pathetically begged them to take pics of me too. now we have robots to add to Project J. if you haven't seen the Project J photos, look at them now. you won't regret it, i promise.
so anyway, and this robotics lab we visited is just one of more than a hundred labs at KAIST working on projects too esoteric for me to comprehend.
for example: a sort of "soundless" lab that has these foamy spongy wedges on the walls, ceilings and under our feet (beneath some metal mesh floor) to absorb sounds and echoes. they use this room to study sounds in a "pure/clean" environment. the waves bounce into the wedges, become smaller and sorta disappear into that place where the sloping parts meet. i'd show you a picture if i could. curse me for breaking my camera. argh.
entering the soundless room was...unsettling. we could feel some kind of pressure, like walking and breathing underwater. but of course there isn't any water or pressure. it's just that the absence of ambient sound affected the way our minds/bodies processed/experienced that place. and when we talked in there (asking questions, ooh-ing at the otherworldly feeling, whispering secrets into wedge-shaped holes a la 2046), it was like you were hearing everyone's voices inside your head.
we were there for only a few minutes and i felt weird for a long time after. imagine what it would be like to stay they for an hour. or a day. or a week. our guide, prof. kim**, said the longest a person's been in the room is 20 minutes. longer than that and you start going nuts. and they're not really interested in trying to see how long a person can last in there. they study music and physics, not madness. yes, i asked.
so why were we there? to talk literature with prof. kim tak-hwan, one of the few cool korean writers we met at the seoul young writers festival at the beginning of may. he teaches digital storytelling at the graduate school of culture technology in KAIST. it's a 10-year experiment, all about studying the tech side of humanities -- music, film, writing, photography, internet, etc. the cool thing about kim tak-hwan is when he writes, he thinks multi-platform: one story can be a novel (2 versions: with footnotes for geeks & critics, tapos lite pop version para sa madlang people), a tv drama series, a movie, a video game, etc.
what's funny is that he made his name writing historical novels. and his best-seller is has a feminist tone and agenda, and the persona is a gaesang (korean equivalent of a geisha) who was also recognized during her lifetime as an exceptional poet. the novel is told from the first person POV, mimics the language of the joseon dynasty, and uses no conjunctions at all. but now he's decided to focus on SF because of where he teaches now (how can he not???).
and he's in the middle of writing a historical love story about a frenchman and a korean chick and is set in various exotic locales like paris & casablanca etc. there's enough romance & tragedy in it so that it's going to be filmed, a collaboration of 3 countries: korea, france and the US. he'll be flying to paris and morocco next month to do ahem research for the story. lucky.
* e.g., an eviscerated toilet bowl lounging in an inflatable kiddie swimming pool, foil-wrapped topiary, and what siege called 'old school'--some big super mario coin thingies pasted on some building's wall. i didn't get what he meant, being old school enough myself to know only atari-era games like pong, pacman, space invaders, etc.
** prof. kim something. i feel awful not remembering her name because she is such a character. she's a cellist and sound scientist who also teaches at KAIST. but dammit, why do they all have to be called kim something-or-other. honestly, i know the following people: kim yeajin, kim tak-hwan, kim mincheol, kim eung hwa, and my professor who i just call kim sonsengnim (an honorific equivalent to ma'am or sir). every other kim, i just forget.
shite, i just cannot resist saying this, even if i know it will make me feel dirty: i know kimchi and kimbap. ang corny ko talaga pag madaling araw.
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