Her Expanded Practice Involves Archival Projects

Mindy Seu (b. 1991, California) is a designer and technologist based in New York City. Her expanded follow involves archival initiatives, techno-critical writing, performative lectures, design commissions, and shut collaborations. Her newest writing surveys feminist economies, historic precursors of the metaverse, and the materiality of the internet. Mindy’s ongoing Cyberfeminism Index, which gathers three decades 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 institutions (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 embody initiatives 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 presently Assistant Professor at Rutgers Mason Gross School of the Arts and Critic at Yale School of Art.


Now, take a second to watch a number of the demo. I ask you, is that not an impressive factor? Does it not look pretty nice, even by today’s standards? By all measures, it was a technical marvel and a superb consumer expertise. But it surely failed - bitterly. Bell Telephone’s plans for the PicturePhone had been ambitious, if not outright delusional. The price of a PicturePhone plan was $160/month. Today, flagship mobile phones promote at around $a 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 make use of them. When was the last time you dropped $150 in a vending machine? That’s the sort of expense we’re speaking about. As batshit because the economics of the PicturePhone were, Bell’s objective was to build a $1 Billion firm - 100,000 PicturePhones in the primary five years; 1,000,000 by 1980; 12,000,000 by 2000. Despite making an ideal piece of gear and truly dazzling the technorati of the time by making it work properly over old, twisted copper wire, that was never going to happen.


Today, it’s straightforward to ask why Bell wouldn’t have just subsidized the product in the early days to build the market. The answer is regulation. On the time, Bell owned a lot of the infrastructure - the network over which the PicturePhone was transmitting. Taking a loss on the device to lock in customers would have triggered a large antitrust case, and nicely, back then companies actually cared about that sort of thing and so did the 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 assist it. Several years before the PicturePhone was released, Bell produced a movie representing their view of the long run, called Seeing the Digital Future, which anticipated so much of today’s digital and web-pushed culture.


Creating the PicturePhone allowed them to experiment with a number of the interactions they anticipated would turn into commonplace, whereas additionally demonstrating the necessity for upgraded infrastructure. That Bell engineers were capable of deliver a device that transmitted stable sound and picture over present telelphone traces was extraordinary. That they had been capable of create such a compact, desk-prepared device that was appropriate with the telephones already sitting on them was also. 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 launched in 1970 anticipated a lot of today’s web experience. Fluid and frequent digital connections between folks, absolutely, but additionally the multimedia nature of how we exchange info at the moment. Bell added video to what had been a completely auditory connection expertise thus far, but additionally they constructed add-ons to attach PicturePhone to mainframe computers, share slides over the screen, and even a mirror module that will enable the unit’s camera to broadcast paperwork you had on your desk.


Undeniably cool, though admittedly niche for the time. Bell hoped that gaining a country’s price of subscribers would power a nationwide improve in digital infrastructure. As it could prove, even the internet, as we know it at the moment, wouldn’t try this. We'd have to distribute credit score for making the common American perceive the need for fiber optic cable among a diverse constituency - from Google to Pornhub. Pricing and infrastructure may be blamed for what would turn into a $500 million loss for Bell Telephone. Even that number doesn’t actually describe how much 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 officially canceled, it had exactly zero of those customers left. But even in 1970, there have been greater than 12 people wealthy enough to be early adopters. So why didn’t they?