My first memory of a computer was in Seoul, where I was born and raised
until the age of 8. We had a black square television, heavy and frumpy,
sitting low to the ground in the middle of our living room. Back then, its height
was comparable to that of me and my brother. Here, we watched Korean comedy shows, Spongebob, and other cartoons.
One day, my dad led us to one of the bedroom doors in excitement.
He said, “I have something to show you” and revealed a white square computer on a desk.
At the time, I was too young to follow his excitement. My dad sat me and my brother on the ground
and turned on the computer to play the first film of The Chronicles of Narnia.
When I started elementary school, I learned to type in a computer lab. The software program had a character
that would frown or smile to reflect my typing progress and I felt motivated to impress my virtual teacher. On our new computer back home,
my mom made me an email address (bigeyes0421) on Hanmail, originally operated by Daum, but now merged with Kakao. My uncle and dad helped me make my first social media account on Cyworld.
Cyworld (싸이월드, Ssaiwoldeu), short for Cyber World and a play off of the Korean word cy (사이, sai), which means between or in relation to, consisted of
mini bedrooms (미니홈피, minihompy) as the main feed. They allowed a wide range of customization for the bedrooms with themes and items that could be purchased using acorns (도토리, dotori),
their official cyber currency. My minihompy was underwater themed with a whale spouting a heart in the center.
I remember feeling so giddy when I was gifted a song to go with my bedroom, Loveable by Kim Jong Kook, that would play automatically when someone visited my room.
The interface was designed to resemble a journal with the bedroom being the first tab. Other tabs included a profile, photo album, journal entry, visitor log, settings, and a bulletin board.
Unlike today’s social platforms that automatically update other people’s content on a scrollable home feed, Cyworld’s main feed was just yourself. If you wanted to see other people’s content,
you had to visit their minihompy (like a profile) one at a time.
I was unable to find or recover my Cyworld. It holds fond memories of the early internet, true to archiving and exploration.
Currently, there are efforts to relaunch Cyworld in 2025, and perhaps there is hope that I can recover my account from over 20 years ago.
Perhaps I can hop between my Korean relatives’ archived minihompies to find old records of me and my family. Perhaps I’ll find my silly visitor log with no real meaning, just an effort to leave a trace that “I was here.”
For the best viewing experience, please view on desktop or scroll horizontally to continue <3
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My family moved to Southern California in the spring of 2006. We lived in Fullerton for most of my childhood
and my brother and I were often home alone. Here, we didn’t have a laptop, a computer, or even access to the internet.
I still don’t really understand how TV cables work, but we used an antenna to crank and twist at just the right angle to watch our favorite shows.
Our go-to shows were Malcolm in the Middle, Are You Smarter than a Fifth Grader, and if we were really lucky, our favorite, The Simpsons.
I loved the opening theme song
and always hoped that it would show the long version of the intro instead of skipping to the couch scene immediately.
My brother and I spent a lot of time worldbuilding by merging Legos and Bionicles. Our stuffed animals were the townspeople in this enmeshed world. For my brother’s birthday, he was gifted a
pink Nintendo DS, the only color that was available at our local GameStop.
My dad embellished the cover with black pointy stickers to supposedly offset the feminine look. I watched my brother finish his quest on Legend of Zelda: Phantom Hourglass
multiple times and when I finally felt brave enough to try, he guided me through the dungeon as we finished the quest together. We also played Brain Age,
somehow unfazed by the floating Asian head hounding us to be better at math, and Pokemon Pearl Version. I found more joy in watching my brother play Nintendo: jumping, clenching,
holding my breath, and cheering with him to live the stories of our virtual characters.
Our childhood was a mix of digital and physical play. We would gift each other Pokemon cards from Target to compare their stats on Nintendo. My brother would fold origami, including dragons, water bombs, and
treasure chests that he would hide around the park for me and my friends to find. Inside the chest would be paper cutouts of green or red gems, just like the ones you would find from The Legend of Zelda.
By the time I was in fifth grade, we finally had access to the internet (yay!) and an old laptop that was entirely in Korean. Navigating the Korean interface and trying to type an essay in English was difficult.
But soon, I was on Youtube, looking up and copying down lyrics to Taylor Swift’s You Belong with Me and the rest of her discography.
In 2009, as a Christmas present, My uncle gifted me a 5th generation purple iPod Nano,
which I still have to this day. He downloaded a selection of 100 songs for me. I did not know most of the songs, but this was where I first heard Hot n Cold by Katy Perry and Sk8er Boi by Avril Lavigne. He did a pretty good job with catering music for a pre-teen girl.
This was the very first time I had an electronic device of my own. Listening to the same 100 songs in the corner of my room or the backseat of the car made me feel like I was in my own secret hideout.
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We moved to Yorba Linda when I started middle school. This was our home for 12 years and a place I still consider to be home. I received my very first phone in fourth grade,
albeit shared between me and my brother. We took turns with the phone, and when it was in my possession, I felt cool to be entrusted with a costly item, or what felt expensive
at the time, during such a young age. It was a black skinny swivel phone that I now know is called the Samsung SGH-F210
and was used for basic communications with our mom for rides and emergencies.
In middle school, I had a blue flip phone with a keypad, an LG 9250 which opened up a whole world of texting.
There were a lot of RAWR xD, ROFL, and other unironically used acronyms that made my adolescent friendships so much richer. My close friend and I exchanged our short stories
and secrets via email and forwarded chain letters of magic tricks and myths.
Middle school was when I started to notice a socioeconomic digital divide when some “cool kids” started bringing iPhones to school. I remember a classmate named Rachel M. who had Facebook and Instagram with over 800 followers.
I felt so confused and enamored. I just couldn’t fathom why or how she knew over 800 people online. I thought having an iPhone meant having access to exclusive social platforms that I could not find anywhere else.
When in reality, it just meant that portable devices allowed the Internet to be no longer fixed to a place of being – it could be housed anywhere and everywhere.
I received my first smartphone, an iPhone 6, during my sophomore year in high school. I never thought having portable access to the internet would affect my day to day life, but I was invariably hooked, and my mom blamed the phone for my grades dropping.
Since then, I have lived through multiple generations of iPhones: SE, XR, 13 Pro (that got mugged on the bus three months after), and my current phone, 11 Pro Max (my previous boss’s old cracked phone that I traded in for a new one).
From middle school through high school, a few international students from Korea lived with my family to study in California. One of them was a girl who was 2 years older than me and the first thing she did was introduce me to Korean pop culture that I didn’t have exposure to growing up in the States.
She went on Naver.com, a search engine that is basically a Korean equivalent of Google, and shared BigBang, 2NE1, Super Junior, ShiNee, and Sistar. I remember feeling such an intense glee of enlightenment
from exposure to culture that I didn’t know even existed. She showed me Webtoon to read comics online. Then there were Korean entertainment shows or yeneung (예능) and soon, Running Man (런닝맨)
and Infinite Challenge (무한도전) were in my weekly rotations. There were times we would pull all nighters to finish DVD’s or online reruns of Korean dramas – Boys over Flowers (꽃보다 남자, 2009), The Slave Hunters (추노, 2010), SungKyunKwan Scandal (성균관 스캔들, 2010).
To have access to my culture abroad felt like I was finally finding out about a big secret. I was ravenous to fill the missing gaps of my Korean heritage through Korean media, online.
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I entered college with a heavy Toshiba laptop in 2017.
During my Media Studies class working session, my peers, as if to have made a previous agreement, all pulled out Apple laptops.
I was the only one in the room without a MacBook. The guy sitting in front of me slid his finger on the keyboard from the letter “a” all the way to “l”
to unlock his laptop on the flat Apple keyboard. I still remember the shock I felt from witnessing such a novel way of setting a password. I had used my Toshiba laptop
with no concerns all throughout my high school years, but this was the first time I noticed laptops as aesthetic props.
Walking around campus with my laptop was no easy feat. I started thinking about the relationship between device portability and
laptop aesthetics, and how minimalist design was a proof of high craftsmanship, but also a form of abstraction and further mystification
of the tools we use. Ownership of laptops was no longer enough. It was the ownership of a sleek, minimalist, aesthetic laptop, and the experience
surrounding it that signified a social status – perhaps a facade of ease (in life, in habits, even in labor and productivity).
In college, I started archiving my images on hard drives. My parents were always devastated that we had lost a chunk of our digital archive during our move from South Korea.
Watching my parents lament our lost record made me especially keen on preserving my past as much as I could. I lived alone my freshman year, but during my sophomore and junior years, I shared my dorm rooms with a close friend.
I always carried a strong image of my roommate engraved in my head, studying late at night, sitting in front of her desk, wearing wired earphones, typing away on her Thinkpad and feeling so soothed by the click clack of her keyboard.
Snapchat was a central social portal in the beginning of college, holding a deep archive of my photos, but did not return in my second year. I found myself relying heavily on Facebook for college communications.
Even before I had stepped foot on campus, I was in various groups and messenger chats, talking to early admitted students about the thrill of what’s to come. Being
affiliated with multiple groups – Class of 2021, AAPI, Neuroscience majors, Orientation Adventure leaders – was like collecting social assets. It was easy to know people on campus just from their profile pictures, names, and affiliations.
Conversations easily sparked from “oh, I’ve seen your name in that one Facebook group before…” or “I noticed that you are so and so’s mutual!.” These digital connections held currency on our small campus.
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I lived in Copenhagen for four months during my junior year of college.
Here, I had 2 phones: my iPhone and an old Samsung that an auntie lent me. My iPhone was “locked” to my carrier, so I couldn’t use a SIM card
with a local Danish number and needed an “unlocked” device. I asked my mom why the phone was locked when it was in my possession and I made payments to use it abroad.
Carrying around two phones felt excessive. My iPhone was used to take pictures and Samsung for texts, calls, and navigation. I wasn’t used to the Samsung interface and didn’t bother
to learn because I knew it was temporary. My iPhone, once a complex device that necessitated my everyday needs, had assumed a new identity as a camera.
Outside of taking cityscapes of my travels, I never reached for the phone to function as a phone.
I lived on the very top floor, a 4 bedroom apartment with a slanted roof, of a six-story building with five other girls.
The top three floors of our building consisted of our “Arts Living and Learning Community.” Abroad, I learned to use military time. I started taking film photography with my dad’s old camera.
I wrote postcards. I took a watercolor painting class. I felt completely detached from the digital space and the tools surrounding it.
Every so often, when I facetimed my friends and family, I would hear updates that felt otherworldly. When asked what so and so was up to, a friend mentioned, “they are making a TikTok,” a phrase I had never heard before.
TikTok was apparently this new, trendy thing that everyone was into on campus, and people were filming videos, ironically or unironically, I couldn’t really tell. I never downloaded TikTok.
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WHO declared COVID-19 as a pandemic the semester after my study abroad. I finished my last three semesters of college online.
My digital liberation from life abroad quickly shifted to a jarring codependence on my devices and their technologies,
saturated and infatuated by the only source of connection in my small bedroom.
I lived my everyday online. My phone was no longer a tool, but a space of occupancy, a bedroom of sorts, to live out my everyday as the sole portal
of access to things that no longer felt close to me. It reminded me of my friendships, my studies, what had been lost, and what I could still hope for,
holding every inch of things imagined and unimagined. Being online told me these things were still very real no matter how far or unseen.
I texted my friends for hours. We took turns hosting monthly catch ups. I watched pre-recorded lectures on the vertebrae sensory system.
I tutored high school students on AP subjects in breakout rooms. I graduated standing in front of our T.V. as my college broadcasted a slideshow of names and majors.
My partner of three years and I broke up on Facetime. I cried in front of the camera. I wondered how much of my sadness seeped through the screen, if any.
During video calls, I traced people’s pixelated outlines with my cursor as the extension of my hand, as if to touch, to hug, to be arm in arm.
Scrolling for hours, I wondered if gentrification was a term that could be applied to the internet. I couldn’t look away, but digital spaces didn’t look or feel the same anymore.
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//$$$$$/ / $$$$$$$$$$$$$$$ /| /
//$$$$$/ / $$$$$$$$$$$$$$$ / | _____________________________ /
//$$$$$/ / $$$$$$$$$$$$$$$ / / // ———————————————————————— // /
//$$$$$/ / $$$$$$$$$$$$$$$ / / // OMOMOMOMOMOMOMOMOMOMOMO // /
//__________________________/ / // *OMOMO* OMOMOM *OMOMO* // /
/ |——————————————————————————| / // OMOMOMOMOMOMOMOMOMOMOMO // /
/ |——————————————————————————|/ //__________________________// /
/ _________ ————————————————————————————- ___________/
/ / /| / /
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/ |————————| /HHHHHHHHHHH/ / | / /
/ | | /H H H H H H/ / | / /
/ ____________ /HHHHHHHHHHH/ | | / /
/ / /| /H H H H H H/ | | / /
/ / /X| /HHHHHHHHHHH/ | |_/ /
/ / /X | /H H H H H H/ | / / /
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In my San Francisco bedroom, I own 3 laptops, 3 different wireless earphones, 2 film cameras, 1 paper camera, an iPad, an iPhone,
a monitor, a Cricut machine, a smart watch, a Marshall’s speaker, and a Marshall’s pair of headphones. I am unsure how I have come to possess so many devices and gadgets in my small space. It’s easy to surrender to another gadget, another technology,
or another app, to find unexpected ownership as they find a home in my space as a gift or a necessity. Their ubiquity and my growing collection often leave me desensitized to the ecology of these tools – I forget about their metal bodies and
the hidden counterparts that do not advertise their origins or how they have been excavated to end up in my bedroom.
Every day, I rely on digital tools and platforms. I am a designer who creates with Adobe; a writer who narrates on Substack;
an artist artist who makes websites.
My relationship to these tools and craft is inevitably intertwined very intimately. Yet these tools’ systems and
infrastructures remain ever-abstract. Each novel device is a wizardly nod to the future only accessed through neatly
packaged shells and branding. Recently, I removed my phone case because I wanted to remember that my phone, a valued portal
to the noise of everyday life, is just a piece of metal.
I tell myself that my digital self is just as real as the physical; that behind a pixelated archive is a person meaning making against the grains of
incessant algorithms and flattened culture. Every time I am online, I wish to remember the wires underground, weaving through their own traffic of
data to sustain my digital self. I don’t know how long I will stay in this city, in this apartment, in this bedroom.
I don’t know how much of myself will be preserved online and for how long. But I have always found archival crafts to be functions of love. I hope to remember these rooms and the person I have been with each occupancy, digital and physical, past and present, as I walk into the future.
Ascii Bedroom Memoir
This is an archive of all the bedrooms I have occupied:
From my earliest memory to present day.
In these spaces, I have shared, crafted, founded,
and lived much of my physical days as well
as my digital days. From my very first encounter
of the internet to now writing my own lines of code,
my digital presence and its relation
to self have shifted as much as I did in the physical.
Thank you for visiting my memory lane,
a deep dive of cross-continental spaces and
their corresponding memories of the internet,
digital artifacts, and me throughout the years.
`'::.
_________H ,%%&%,
/\ _ \%&&%%&%
/ \___/^\___\%&%%&&
| | [] [] |%\Y&%'
| | .-. | ||
~~@._|@@_|||_@@|~||~~~~~~~~~~~~~ welcome home
`""") )"""`
Big thank you to all who
made this project possible:
Ahmed, Khang, and the HTML
Review Team: Maxwell & Shelby
All ascii art handmade or sourced
from the Ascii Art Archive
By Eileen Ahn, 2025
Image Index
The images listed below do not belong to me.
If you are the owner and have problems with image
usage and would like it to be taken down, please
let me know. Listed in the order of appearance: