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 practice includes archival tasks, techno-essential writing, performative lectures, design commissions, and shut collaborations. Her newest writing surveys feminist economies, historical precursors of the metaverse, and the materiality of the web. Mindy’s ongoing Cyberfeminism Index, which gathers three a long time of on-line activism and net artwork, was commissioned by Rhizome, presented at the brand 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 consultation embrace 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 at present Assistant Professor at Rutgers Mason Gross School of the Arts and Critic at Yale School of Art.

Now, take a second to observe a number of the demo. I ask you, is that not an impressive factor? Does it not look pretty great, even by today’s standards? By all measures, it was a technical marvel and an excellent consumer experience. But it failed - bitterly. Bell Telephone’s plans for the PicturePhone had been bold, if not outright delusional. The cost of a PicturePhone plan was $160/month. Today, flagship mobile phones sell at round $a thousand a chunk, 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 final time you dropped $150 in a vending machine? That’s the sort of expense we’re speaking about. As batshit because the economics of the PicturePhone were, Bell’s aim was to build 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 incredible piece of gear 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 reply is regulation. At the time, Bell owned a lot of the infrastructure - the community over which the PicturePhone was transmitting. Taking a loss on the gadget to lock in clients would have triggered an enormous antitrust case, and effectively, back then corporations really cared about that type of thing and so did the federal government. So, the PicturePhone was forced to be exorbitantly expensive. Though an financial misfit, the PicturePhone was an excellent machine and an excellent better catalyst. Researchers at Bell Labs knew that a digital future was at hand, and that new infrastructure could be required to support 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 so much of today’s digital and web-driven tradition.

Creating the PicturePhone allowed them to experiment with a few of the interactions they anticipated would become commonplace, while also demonstrating the necessity for upgraded infrastructure. That Bell engineers were able to deliver a device that transmitted strong sound and picture over current telelphone lines was extraordinary. That they were able to create such a compact, desk-prepared machine that was appropriate 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 these features, the PicturePhone released in 1970 anticipated much of today’s web expertise. Fluid and frequent digital connections between individuals, completely, but also the multimedia nature of how we exchange info as we speak. Bell added video to what had been a completely auditory connection expertise to date, but additionally they constructed add-ons to connect PicturePhone to mainframe computer systems, share slides over the display, and even a mirror module that might enable the unit’s digital camera to broadcast documents you had in your desk.

Undeniably cool, although admittedly niche for the time. Bell hoped that gaining a country’s worth of subscribers would power a nationwide improve in digital infrastructure. As it could turn out, even the web, as we know it at this time, wouldn’t try this. We'd have to distribute credit score for making the average American perceive the necessity for fiber optic cable among a diverse constituency - from Google to Pornhub. Pricing and infrastructure may be blamed for what would turn out to be a $500 million loss for Bell Telephone. Even that quantity doesn’t actually describe how a lot of a misfire the PicturePhone was compared with the fact that in the primary 6 months, solely 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 more than 12 individuals wealthy enough to be early adopters. So why didn’t they?