Her Expanded Practice Involves Archival Projects

Mindy Seu (b. 1991, California) is a designer and technologist primarily based in New York City. Her expanded practice involves archival projects, techno-important writing, performative lectures, design commissions, porn and close 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 decades of online activism and web artwork, was commissioned by Rhizome, introduced at the brand new Museum, and awarded the Graham Foundation Grant. She has lectured internationally at cultural institutions (Barbican Centre, New Museum), educational 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 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 person experience. However it failed - bitterly. Bell Telephone’s plans for the PicturePhone had been formidable, if not outright delusional. The price of a PicturePhone plan was $160/month. Today, flagship cellphones sell at around $1000 a chunk, but 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 use them. When was the final time you dropped $one hundred fifty in a vending machine? That’s the form of expense we’re talking about. As batshit as the economics of the PicturePhone were, Bell’s goal was to build a $1 Billion firm - 100,000 PicturePhones in the first 5 years; 1,000,000 by 1980; 12,000,000 by 2000. Despite making a great piece of equipment and really dazzling the technorati of the time by making it work effectively over previous, twisted copper wire, that was never going to happen.

Today, it’s simple to ask why Bell wouldn’t have simply subsidized the product in the early days to construct the market. The reply is regulation. At the time, Bell owned many of the infrastructure - the community over which the PicturePhone was transmitting. Taking a loss on the machine to lock in clients would have triggered a massive antitrust case, and nicely, again then companies actually cared about that kind of thing and so did the government. So, the PicturePhone was compelled to be exorbitantly costly. Though an economic misfit, the PicturePhone was a superb machine and an even higher catalyst. Researchers at Bell Labs knew that a digital future was at hand, and that new infrastructure would be required to support it. Several years before the PicturePhone was released, Bell produced a film representing their view of the future, called 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 change into commonplace, while also demonstrating the necessity for upgraded infrastructure. That Bell engineers were capable of ship a device that transmitted solid sound and image over present telelphone strains was extraordinary. That they had been 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 these options, the PicturePhone released in 1970 anticipated much of today’s web expertise. Fluid and frequent digital connections between folks, absolutely, but additionally the multimedia nature of how we trade information immediately. Bell added video to what had been a wholly auditory connection experience to date, but additionally they built add-ons to attach PicturePhone to mainframe computers, share slides over the display, and even a mirror module that would enable the unit’s digicam to broadcast paperwork you had in your desk.

Undeniably cool, though admittedly area of interest for the time. Bell hoped that gaining a country’s value of subscribers would pressure a nationwide upgrade in digital infrastructure. As it will prove, even the internet, as we understand it right now, wouldn’t do that. We would have to distribute credit for making the common American understand the need for fiber optic cable amongst a diverse constituency - from Google to Pornhub. Pricing and infrastructure could be blamed for what would turn into a $500 million loss for Bell Telephone. Even that number doesn’t really describe how a lot of a misfire the PicturePhone was in contrast with the fact that in the first 6 months, solely 12 clients subscribed to the service, and by the time it was officially canceled, it had precisely zero of those customers left. But even in 1970, there have been more than 12 folks wealthy sufficient to be early adopters. So why didn’t they?