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 entails archival tasks, techno-important writing, performative lectures, design commissions, and shut collaborations. Her latest writing surveys feminist economies, historic precursors of the metaverse, and the materiality of the web. Mindy’s ongoing Cyberfeminism Index, which gathers three a long time of online activism and net art, was commissioned by Rhizome, introduced at the brand new Museum, and awarded the Graham Foundation Grant. She has lectured internationally at cultural institutions (Barbican Centre, New Museum), educational establishments (Columbia University, Central Saint Martins), and mainstream platforms (Pornhub, SSENSE, Google), and been a resident at MacDowell, Sitterwerk Foundation, Pioneer Works, and Internet Archive. Her design commissions and consultation embrace initiatives 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 currently Assistant Professor at Rutgers Mason Gross School of the Arts and Critic at Yale School of Art.

Now, take a moment to observe some of the demo. I ask you, is that not a formidable thing? Does it not look pretty great, even by today’s requirements? By all measures, it was a technical marvel and a good consumer experience. But it failed - bitterly. Bell Telephone’s plans for the PicturePhone were formidable, if not outright delusional. The price of a PicturePhone plan was $160/month. Today, flagship cellphones sell at around $one thousand a bit, however could you imagine paying that worth 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 $one hundred fifty in a vending machine? That’s the sort of expense we’re talking about. As batshit because the economics of the PicturePhone were, Bell’s aim was to construct a $1 Billion firm - 100,000 PicturePhones in the first five years; 1,000,000 by 1980; 12,000,000 by 2000. Despite making an excellent piece of tools and actually dazzling the technorati of the time by making it work well over outdated, twisted copper wire, that was never going to happen.

Today, it’s easy to ask why Bell wouldn’t have just subsidized the product in the early days to construct the market. The answer is regulation. At the time, Bell owned many of the infrastructure - the community over which the PicturePhone was transmitting. Taking a loss on the gadget to lock in prospects would have triggered a massive antitrust case, and well, back then companies really cared about that form of factor and so did the federal government. So, the PicturePhone was compelled to be exorbitantly expensive. Though an economic misfit, the PicturePhone was an excellent machine and an even better catalyst. Researchers at Bell Labs knew that a digital future was at hand, and that new infrastructure can be required to help it. Several years before the PicturePhone was launched, Bell produced a film representing their view of the longer term, known as Seeing the Digital Future, which anticipated a lot of today’s digital and web-driven culture.

Creating the PicturePhone allowed them to experiment with a number of the interactions they expected would grow to be commonplace, whereas also demonstrating the necessity for upgraded infrastructure. That Bell engineers have been capable of deliver a device that transmitted strong sound and picture over existing telelphone strains was extraordinary. That they have been able to create such a compact, desk-ready gadget 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 these features, the PicturePhone released in 1970 anticipated a lot of today’s internet expertise. Fluid and frequent digital connections between folks, absolutely, but also the multimedia nature of how we trade information at present. Bell added video to what had been a completely auditory connection expertise thus far, but in addition they constructed add-ons to connect PicturePhone to mainframe computers, share slides over the screen, and even a mirror module that will allow the unit’s digital camera to broadcast documents you had on your desk.

Undeniably cool, although admittedly niche for the time. Bell hoped that gaining a country’s worth of subscribers would drive a nationwide improve in digital infrastructure. As it will end up, even the web, as we understand it at this time, wouldn’t do that. We might should distribute credit for making the typical American perceive the need for fiber optic cable amongst a various constituency - from Google to Pornhub. Pricing and infrastructure could be blamed for what would become 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 fact that in the first 6 months, only 12 customers subscribed to the service, and by the time it was officially canceled, it had exactly zero of these customers left. But even in 1970, there were greater than 12 individuals rich sufficient to be early adopters. So why didn’t they?