Upon entering the Giant Robot store and hearing Eric Nakamura speak for a few minutes, it became clear that this visit/presentation would me more akin to that of Jonathan Wells, the founder of Resfest and Res Magazine, than to any of the other presentations. The reason for this is that, while both Nakamura and Wells are surely capable designers, they have both built their individual transmedia business properties based on an obsession and a desire to curate a certain kind of work. Whereas Wells is interested in digital cinema, Nakamura is interested in Asian pop culture. Another similarity is that in both cases, the criteria for selecting items to be included in the venues seem to be based more on their own subjective opinion, whether or not a piece has a certain aesthetic appeal, rather than selecting them based upon a set of strict guidelines. In other words, although both Giant Robot and Res are highly successful business properties, they remain, in essence, the “pet projects” of their respective founders.

   Being unfamiliar with Asian pop culture, I found the Giant Robot store to be quite fascinating. The store is filled with all sorts of Asian imports, from books to shirts to toys. As I perused through the store’s impressive inventory, I found the aesthetic of the artifacts to be foreign, and yet somehow at the same time it was quite familiar to me. I tried to come up with an reason for this. At first I wondered if it had something to do with my half-asian, half-caucasian ethnicity, that perhaps there was some sort of subconscious recognition and attraction to the items in the store. This I quickly dismissed, realizing that I had received so little asian culture and traditions from my family that my cultural background is wholly American. Then I realized that the aesthetic of asian pop culture is not all that dissimilar to that of american pop culture, the reason being mutual influence. In particular, I noticed similarities between much of the pop asian visual aesthetic and that of american hip-hop and skateboarding urban culture. In fact, quite a few items in the store were not foreign imports but rather American products, further enforcing the notion of mutual influence and the blending of cultures, something that Giant Robot seems to be furthering.