Her Expanded Practice Involves Archival Projects > 자유게시판

Mindy Seu (b. 1991, California) is a designer and technologist based mostly in New York City. Her expanded apply entails archival projects, techno-critical 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 on-line 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 institutions (Barbican Centre, New Museum), museumbola tutorial institutions (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 include tasks 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 extra. 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 a number of the demo. I ask you, is that not a powerful thing? Does it not look pretty nice, even by today’s standards? By all measures, it was a technical marvel and a good user experience. But it failed - bitterly. Bell Telephone’s plans for the PicturePhone have been formidable, if not outright delusional. The cost of a PicturePhone plan was $160/month. Today, flagship mobile phones sell at around $a thousand a piece, but might 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 $one hundred fifty in a vending machine? That’s the type of expense we’re speaking about. As batshit because the economics of the PicturePhone had been, Bell’s aim was to build 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 incredible piece of equipment and really dazzling the technorati of the time by making it work well over previous, twisted copper wire, that was never going to occur.

Today, it’s straightforward to ask why Bell wouldn’t have simply subsidized the product in the early days to build the market. The answer is regulation. On the time, Bell owned a lot of the infrastructure - the network over which the PicturePhone was transmitting. Taking a loss on the gadget to lock in prospects would have triggered an enormous antitrust case, and well, back then firms truly cared about that type of factor and so did the federal government. So, the PicturePhone was forced to be exorbitantly expensive. Though an economic misfit, the PicturePhone was an excellent machine and a good 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 tradition.

Creating the PicturePhone allowed them to experiment with a number of the interactions they anticipated would change into commonplace, while also demonstrating the need for upgraded infrastructure. That Bell engineers had been able to deliver a device that transmitted stable sound and picture over existing telelphone strains was extraordinary. That they had been capable of create such a compact, desk-ready system that was compatible with the telephones already sitting on them was also. 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 options, the PicturePhone released in 1970 anticipated a lot of today’s internet expertise. Fluid and frequent digital connections between individuals, absolutely, but in addition the multimedia nature of how we change information right now. Bell added video to what had been a completely auditory connection expertise so far, however additionally they built add-ons to connect PicturePhone to mainframe computer systems, share slides over the display screen, and even a mirror module that would permit the unit’s digicam to broadcast paperwork you had in your desk.

Undeniably cool, although admittedly area of interest for the time. Bell hoped that gaining a country’s price of subscribers would force a nationwide improve in digital infrastructure. As it will turn out, even the web, as we know it right now, wouldn’t try this. We would should distribute credit score for making the typical American perceive the need for fiber optic cable among a diverse constituency - from Google to Pornhub. Pricing and infrastructure might be blamed for what would transform a $500 million loss for Bell Telephone. Even that quantity doesn’t really describe how a lot of a misfire the PicturePhone was compared with the truth that in the primary 6 months, solely 12 customers subscribed to the service, and by the time it was formally canceled, it had exactly zero of these clients left. But even in 1970, there were greater than 12 folks wealthy sufficient to be early adopters. So why didn’t they?