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 follow includes archival projects, techno-essential writing, performative lectures, design commissions, and shut collaborations. Her latest writing surveys feminist economies, historic precursors of the metaverse, and the materiality of the internet. Mindy’s ongoing Cyberfeminism Index, which gathers three a long time of on-line activism and net artwork, was commissioned by Rhizome, introduced at the brand new Museum, and awarded the Graham Foundation Grant. She has lectured internationally at cultural establishments (Barbican Centre, New Museum), educational 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 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 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 a number of the demo. I ask you, is that not an impressive factor? Does it not look fairly nice, even by today’s requirements? By all measures, it was a technical marvel and a very good consumer experience. Nevertheless it failed - bitterly. Bell Telephone’s plans for the PicturePhone were ambitious, if not outright delusional. The cost of a PicturePhone plan was $160/month. Today, flagship mobile phones sell at around $one thousand a chunk, but could you think about paying that worth 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 kind of expense we’re talking about. As batshit as the economics of the PicturePhone have been, 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 awesome piece of tools and actually dazzling the technorati of the time by making it work effectively over previous, twisted copper wire, that was by no means going to occur.

Today, it’s straightforward to ask why Bell wouldn’t have simply subsidized the product within the early days to construct the market. The reply is regulation. At the time, Bell owned most of the infrastructure - the community over which the PicturePhone was transmitting. Taking a loss on the device to lock in prospects would have triggered a large antitrust case, and effectively, back then companies truly cared about that form of factor and so did the federal government. So, the PicturePhone was pressured to be exorbitantly costly. Though an financial misfit, the PicturePhone was a wonderful machine and an excellent higher 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 released, Bell produced a film 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 among the interactions they expected would become commonplace, whereas additionally demonstrating the necessity for upgraded infrastructure. That Bell engineers have been in a position to deliver a device that transmitted stable sound and picture over present 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 camera that used actual glass optics and was refocusable and repositionable remotely makes me covet it, even now. Beyond these options, the PicturePhone released in 1970 anticipated a lot of today’s web expertise. Fluid and frequent digital connections between individuals, completely, but in addition the multimedia nature of how we exchange data right now. Bell added video to what had been a wholly auditory connection expertise so far, but additionally they built add-ons to attach PicturePhone to mainframe computers, share slides over the screen, and even a mirror module that may enable the unit’s camera to broadcast documents 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 will prove, even the web, as we understand it at present, wouldn’t do that. We'd have to distribute credit for making the common American understand the necessity for fiber optic cable amongst a diverse constituency - from Google to Pornhub. Pricing and infrastructure may be blamed for what would become 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 fact that in the first 6 months, only 12 prospects subscribed to the service, and by the point it was formally canceled, it had exactly zero of those customers left. But even in 1970, there were greater than 12 individuals rich sufficient to be early adopters. So why didn’t they?