Beach Umbrella

“Should I classify the luxuriant growth of objects as we do with a flora or fauna, complete with tropical and glacial species, sudden mutations, and varieties threatened by extinction?” Beach Umbrella is a short film in which a computer categorizes the city of Seoul (Korea) using Street View archives of companies like Google, Kakao (Daum) and Naver. It questions how technology can be used to examine urban changes such as gentrification. By witnessing the birth, life and death of objects, aesthetics and urban phenomena through extensive visual archives, technology becomes like a fortune teller: reading, analyzing and predicting the future of the city. It shows the past, present and future of one of the objects often used by small businesses and street vendors: the beach umbrella.