Her Expanded Practice Involves Archival Projects > 자유게시판

Mindy Seu (b. 1991, California) is a designer and technologist based in New York City. Her expanded follow involves archival tasks, techno-essential writing, performative lectures, design commissions, and close 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 many years of online activism and net art, was commissioned by Rhizome, presented at the brand new Museum, and awarded the Graham Foundation Grant. She has lectured internationally at cultural establishments (Barbican Centre, New Museum), tutorial 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 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, xhamster 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 at the moment Assistant Professor at Rutgers Mason Gross School of the Arts and Critic at Yale School of Art.

Now, take a moment to observe a few 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 a very good consumer expertise. But it surely failed - bitterly. Bell Telephone’s plans for the PicturePhone have been ambitious, if not outright delusional. The cost of a PicturePhone plan was $160/month. Today, flagship cell phones promote at round $a thousand a chunk, however might you imagine paying that value every month for service? That’s what $160 would have felt like in 1970. Bell arrange PicturePhone booths in New York, Chicago, and Washington, D.C. 20/minute to use them. When was the last time you dropped $a hundred and fifty in a vending machine? That’s the form of expense we’re speaking about. As batshit as the economics of the PicturePhone had been, Bell’s purpose 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 a great piece of equipment and truly dazzling the technorati of the time by making it work properly over outdated, twisted copper wire, that was never going to happen.

Today, it’s easy to ask why Bell wouldn’t have simply subsidized the product in 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 system to lock in customers would have triggered a large antitrust case, and effectively, again then corporations really cared about that kind of factor and so did the federal government. So, the PicturePhone was forced to be exorbitantly costly. Though an financial misfit, the PicturePhone was a superb machine and a fair better catalyst. Researchers at Bell Labs knew that a digital future was at hand, and that new infrastructure would be required to help it. Several years earlier than the PicturePhone was launched, Bell produced a film representing their view of the future, referred to 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 anticipated would grow to be commonplace, whereas also demonstrating the necessity for upgraded infrastructure. That Bell engineers have been able to ship a system that transmitted strong sound and image over existing telelphone lines was extraordinary. That they have been in a position to create such a compact, desk-prepared device 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 launched in 1970 anticipated much of today’s internet expertise. Fluid and frequent digital connections between people, completely, but in addition the multimedia nature of how we exchange info at present. Bell added video to what had been a completely auditory connection experience so far, but in addition they built add-ons to connect PicturePhone to mainframe computer systems, share slides over the screen, and even a mirror module that would allow the unit’s camera to broadcast documents you had in your desk.

Undeniably cool, though admittedly area of interest for the time. Bell hoped that gaining a country’s price of subscribers would drive a nationwide upgrade in digital infrastructure. As it will prove, even the web, as we realize it at present, wouldn’t do that. We'd have to distribute credit score for making the common 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 change into 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 truth that in the first 6 months, solely 12 customers 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 people rich enough to be early adopters. So why didn’t they?