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 apply involves archival initiatives, techno-vital writing, performative lectures, design commissions, and close collaborations. Her newest writing surveys feminist economies, historical precursors of the metaverse, and the materiality of the internet. Mindy’s ongoing Cyberfeminism Index, which gathers three a long time of online activism and net art, was commissioned by Rhizome, introduced at the new Museum, and awarded the Graham Foundation Grant. She has lectured internationally at cultural institutions (Barbican Centre, New Museum), 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 session embody 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, porn 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 observe some of the demo. I ask you, is that not a powerful thing? Does it not look fairly nice, even by today’s standards? By all measures, it was a technical marvel and an excellent user expertise. 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 cell phones sell at around $a thousand a chunk, but could you think about 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 form of expense we’re talking about. As batshit because the economics of the PicturePhone have 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 excellent piece of equipment and actually dazzling the technorati of the time by making it work effectively over previous, twisted copper wire, that was never going to occur.

Today, it’s straightforward to ask why Bell wouldn’t have just subsidized the product within the early days to build the market. The answer is regulation. At the time, Bell owned most of the infrastructure - the community over which the PicturePhone was transmitting. Taking a loss on the machine to lock in prospects would have triggered a large antitrust case, and nicely, again then corporations really cared about that form of thing and so did the federal government. So, the PicturePhone was pressured to be exorbitantly costly. Though an economic misfit, the PicturePhone was an excellent machine and an excellent higher 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 movie representing their view of the longer term, called Seeing the Digital Future, which anticipated a lot of today’s digital and web-pushed culture.

Creating the PicturePhone allowed them to experiment with some of the interactions they anticipated would turn out to be commonplace, whereas additionally demonstrating the need for upgraded infrastructure. That Bell engineers had been in a position to ship a system that transmitted stable sound and image over present telelphone strains was extraordinary. That they were capable of create such a compact, desk-ready machine that was suitable with the telephones already sitting on them was also. That the PicturePhone had a digital camera that used real glass optics and was refocusable and repositionable remotely makes me covet it, even now. Beyond these options, the PicturePhone released in 1970 anticipated much of today’s web experience. Fluid and frequent digital connections between individuals, absolutely, but additionally the multimedia nature of how we alternate info in the present day. Bell added video to what had been a completely auditory connection experience up to now, but additionally they built add-ons to attach PicturePhone to mainframe computer systems, share slides over the display, and even a mirror module that may permit the unit’s camera to broadcast paperwork 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 upgrade in digital infrastructure. As it could turn out, even the internet, as we comprehend it as we speak, wouldn’t try this. We might should distribute credit score for making the common American understand the need 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 number doesn’t actually describe how much of a misfire the PicturePhone was in contrast with the truth that in the primary 6 months, only 12 customers subscribed to the service, and by the time it was formally canceled, it had exactly zero of those customers left. But even in 1970, there have been greater than 12 individuals wealthy sufficient to be early adopters. So why didn’t they?