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 observe includes archival projects, techno-critical writing, performative lectures, design commissions, and close collaborations. Her latest writing surveys feminist economies, historical precursors of the metaverse, and the materiality of the web. Mindy’s ongoing Cyberfeminism Index, which gathers three decades of online activism and net artwork, was commissioned by Rhizome, offered at the new Museum, and awarded the Graham Foundation Grant. She has lectured internationally at cultural institutions (Barbican Centre, New Museum), academic 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 session embody 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 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 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 a powerful thing? Does it not look fairly great, even by today’s requirements? By all measures, it was a technical marvel and a great consumer expertise. But it surely failed - bitterly. Bell Telephone’s plans for the PicturePhone have been ambitious, if not outright delusional. The price of a PicturePhone plan was $160/month. Today, flagship cellphones promote at round $one thousand a piece, however could you think about paying that worth each 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 $150 in a vending machine? That’s the sort of expense we’re talking about. As batshit as the economics of the PicturePhone had been, Bell’s goal was to construct 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 ideal piece of tools and really 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 simple to ask why Bell wouldn’t have just subsidized the product within the early days to construct the market. The reply is regulation. On the time, Bell owned most of the infrastructure - the network over which the PicturePhone was transmitting. Taking a loss on the gadget to lock in clients would have triggered a large antitrust case, and nicely, back then corporations truly cared about that type of thing and so did the government. So, the PicturePhone was forced to be exorbitantly costly. Though an economic misfit, the PicturePhone was a superb machine and an even 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 earlier than the PicturePhone was launched, Bell produced a movie representing their view of the longer term, known as Seeing the Digital Future, which anticipated a lot of today’s digital and internet-driven tradition.

Creating the PicturePhone allowed them to experiment with some of the interactions they expected would turn into commonplace, whereas also demonstrating the need for upgraded infrastructure. That Bell engineers were capable of deliver a machine that transmitted strong sound and picture over current telelphone strains was extraordinary. That they were able to create such a compact, desk-prepared machine that was suitable with the telephones already sitting on them was additionally. That the PicturePhone had a digital camera that used actual glass optics and was refocusable and repositionable remotely makes me covet it, even now. Beyond those features, the PicturePhone released in 1970 anticipated much of today’s web experience. Fluid and frequent digital connections between individuals, completely, but in addition the multimedia nature of how we exchange information today. Bell added video to what had been a completely auditory connection experience up to now, however in addition they constructed add-ons to connect PicturePhone to mainframe computers, share slides over the display screen, and even a mirror module that will enable the unit’s digital camera 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 worth of subscribers would force a nationwide upgrade in digital infrastructure. As it could turn out, even the web, as we comprehend it right now, wouldn’t do this. We might should distribute credit for making the typical American perceive the need for fiber optic cable amongst a diverse constituency - from Google to Pornhub. Pricing and infrastructure might be blamed for what would turn out to be a $500 million loss for Bell Telephone. Even that quantity doesn’t actually describe how much of a misfire the PicturePhone was in contrast with the truth that in the first 6 months, only 12 clients subscribed to the service, and by the point it was officially canceled, it had exactly zero of these customers left. But even in 1970, there have been greater than 12 individuals rich enough to be early adopters. So why didn’t they?