• 목록
• 답변
• 글쓰기
• 게시판 리스트 옵션
  • 수정
  • 삭제

Mindy Seu (b. 1991, California) is a designer and technologist primarily based in New York City. Her expanded follow involves archival initiatives, techno-important writing, performative lectures, design commissions, and shut 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 a long time of online activism and web art, was commissioned by Rhizome, introduced at the new Museum, and awarded the Graham Foundation Grant. She has lectured internationally at cultural establishments (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 consultation embrace projects 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 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 some of the demo. I ask you, is that not an impressive thing? Does it not look pretty nice, even by today’s standards? By all measures, it was a technical marvel and a very good consumer expertise. Nevertheless it failed - bitterly. Bell Telephone’s plans for the PicturePhone have been bold, if not outright delusional. The cost of a PicturePhone plan was $160/month. Today, flagship mobile phones sell at around $1000 a piece, however could you imagine paying that price 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 make use of them. When was the final time you dropped $150 in a vending machine? That’s the type of expense we’re talking about. As batshit as the economics of the PicturePhone had been, Bell’s goal was to build a $1 Billion company - 100,000 PicturePhones in the primary 5 years; 1,000,000 by 1980; 12,000,000 by 2000. Despite making an amazing piece of tools and really dazzling the technorati of the time by making it work well over old, 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 construct the market. The answer is regulation. At 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 prospects would have triggered an enormous antitrust case, and nicely, again then companies truly cared about that sort of factor and so did the federal government. So, the PicturePhone was forced to be exorbitantly costly. Though an economic misfit, the PicturePhone was a wonderful machine and an excellent better catalyst. Researchers at Bell Labs knew that a digital future was at hand, and that new infrastructure can be required to assist it. Several years before the PicturePhone was released, Bell produced a movie representing their view of the long run, known as Seeing the Digital Future, which anticipated so much of today’s digital and web-pushed culture.

Creating the PicturePhone allowed them to experiment with among the interactions they expected would turn into commonplace, whereas additionally demonstrating the necessity for upgraded infrastructure. That Bell engineers were capable of deliver a gadget that transmitted strong sound and image over present telelphone strains was extraordinary. That they have been in a position 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 real 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 experience. Fluid and frequent digital connections between people, completely, but in addition the multimedia nature of how we change info today. Bell added video to what had been an entirely auditory connection experience to date, however they also built add-ons to connect PicturePhone to mainframe computer systems, share slides over the display screen, and even a mirror module that would enable the unit’s digicam 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 force a nationwide upgrade in digital infrastructure. As it will prove, even the web, as we know it at present, wouldn’t do that. We would 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 can be blamed for what would become a $500 million loss for Bell Telephone. Even that quantity doesn’t actually describe how a lot of a misfire the PicturePhone was in contrast with the fact that in the first 6 months, solely 12 prospects subscribed to the service, and by the time it was officially canceled, it had precisely zero of those clients left. But even in 1970, there have been greater than 12 folks wealthy sufficient to be early adopters. So why didn’t they?