Artist in Person

An insider's look at the rise and fall of one Asian American-founded Internet company-and the dot.com culture of utopian braggadocio and jovial capitalism it embodied-e-dreams serves as a living textbook for the whirlwind technological and cultural changes of the past few years. Joseph Park and Yong Kang, two young Korean American entrepreneurs, started Kozmo.com out of their living room; within three years they had expanded into a multi-city operation and become stars of the "new media" boom, appearing on CNN and salivating over the zillion dollars their upcoming IPO promised. Unfortunately, no one predicted the market crash of April 2000, when all that money-and all those jobs-disappeared. The debatable power of Kozmo's "revolution" (seemingly the ability to hand-deliver candy bars to Internet-surfing couch potatoes), combined with the high-toned discourse and rivers of money that bizarrely flowed around it, makes their story an elemental vision (or unwitting parody, depending on your point of view) of the entire dot.com age, one that e-dreams encapsulates in all its mesmerizing, groundbreaking, and periodically idiotic energy.

-Jason Sanders