Her Expanded Practice Involves Archival Projects > 자유게시판

Mindy Seu (b. 1991, California) is a designer and technologist primarily based in New York City. Her expanded practice involves archival tasks, techno-important writing, performative lectures, design commissions, and shut collaborations. Her latest writing surveys feminist economies, historical precursors of the metaverse, and the materiality of the internet. Mindy’s ongoing Cyberfeminism Index, which gathers three decades of online activism and web art, was commissioned by Rhizome, offered at the brand new Museum, and awarded the Graham Foundation Grant. She has lectured internationally at cultural establishments (Barbican Centre, New Museum), educational establishments (Columbia University, Central Saint Martins), and mainstream platforms (Pornhub, SSENSE, porn Google), and been a resident at MacDowell, Sitterwerk Foundation, Pioneer Works, and Internet Archive. Her design commissions and session embrace projects for the Serpentine Gallery, Canadian Centre for Architecture, and MIT Media Lab. Her work has been featured in Frieze, Dazed, Gagosian Quarterly, Brooklyn Rail, i-D, and more. Mindy holds an M.Des. Harvard’s Graduate School of Design and a B.A. Design Media Arts from the University of California, Los Angeles. She is presently Assistant Professor at Rutgers Mason Gross School of the Arts and Critic at Yale School of Art.

Now, take a moment to look at some of the demo. I ask you, is that not an impressive thing? Does it not look pretty great, even by today’s standards? By all measures, it was a technical marvel and a great consumer expertise. Nevertheless it failed - bitterly. Bell Telephone’s plans for the PicturePhone were bold, if not outright delusional. The price of a PicturePhone plan was $160/month. Today, flagship mobile phones promote at round $1000 a piece, however may you imagine paying that value every month for service? That’s what $160 would have felt like in 1970. Bell set up PicturePhone booths in New York, Chicago, and Washington, D.C. 20/minute to make use of them. When was the last time you dropped $150 in a vending machine? That’s the type of expense we’re talking about. As batshit as the economics of the PicturePhone have been, Bell’s aim was to construct a $1 Billion company - 100,000 PicturePhones in the first five years; 1,000,000 by 1980; 12,000,000 by 2000. Despite making an ideal piece of gear and truly dazzling the technorati of the time by making it work well over outdated, twisted copper wire, that was never going to occur.

Today, it’s easy to ask why Bell wouldn’t have simply subsidized the product in the early days to construct the market. The reply is regulation. At the time, Bell owned most of the infrastructure - the network over which the PicturePhone was transmitting. Taking a loss on the machine to lock in customers would have triggered a large antitrust case, and nicely, again then firms truly cared about that kind of thing and so did the federal government. So, the PicturePhone was forced to be exorbitantly costly. Though an economic misfit, the PicturePhone was a wonderful machine and a fair better catalyst. Researchers at Bell Labs knew that a digital future was at hand, and that new infrastructure can be required to support it. Several years earlier than the PicturePhone was released, Bell produced a movie representing their view of the long run, known as Seeing the Digital Future, which anticipated a lot of today’s digital and internet-pushed tradition.

Creating the PicturePhone allowed them to experiment with a number of the interactions they expected would become commonplace, while also demonstrating the necessity for upgraded infrastructure. That Bell engineers were in a position to deliver a machine that transmitted stable sound and image over current telelphone lines was extraordinary. That they were able to create such a compact, desk-ready machine that was appropriate with the telephones already sitting on them was additionally. That the PicturePhone had a digicam that used actual glass optics and was refocusable and repositionable remotely makes me covet it, even now. Beyond those features, the PicturePhone released in 1970 anticipated a lot of today’s internet expertise. Fluid and frequent digital connections between people, absolutely, but additionally the multimedia nature of how we exchange info immediately. Bell added video to what had been a completely auditory connection experience thus far, however in addition they built add-ons to connect PicturePhone to mainframe computers, share slides over the display, and even a mirror module that would enable the unit’s digicam to broadcast paperwork you had in your desk.

Undeniably cool, although admittedly niche for the time. Bell hoped that gaining a country’s worth of subscribers would force a nationwide improve in digital infrastructure. As it could prove, even the internet, as we understand it right now, wouldn’t do this. We'd should distribute credit score for making the typical American understand the necessity for fiber optic cable amongst a diverse constituency - from Google to Pornhub. Pricing and infrastructure could be blamed for what would develop into a $500 million loss for Bell Telephone. Even that quantity doesn’t really describe how a lot of a misfire the PicturePhone was in contrast with the truth that in the first 6 months, only 12 clients subscribed to the service, and by the time it was formally canceled, it had precisely zero of those customers left. But even in 1970, there have been more than 12 folks wealthy sufficient to be early adopters. So why didn’t they?