Mindy Seu (b. 1991, California) is a designer and technologist primarily based in New York City. Her expanded practice includes archival projects, techno-crucial writing, performative lectures, design commissions, and close collaborations. Her newest writing surveys feminist economies, historical precursors of the metaverse, and the materiality of the internet. Mindy’s ongoing Cyberfeminism Index, which gathers three many years of online activism and internet artwork, 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), 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 embrace 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 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 second to observe some of the demo. I ask you, is that not a formidable factor? Does it not look pretty great, even by today’s standards? By all measures, it was a technical marvel and an excellent user experience. However it failed - bitterly. Bell Telephone’s plans for the PicturePhone had been formidable, if not outright delusional. The cost of a PicturePhone plan was $160/month. Today, flagship cellphones promote at around $a thousand a chunk, but 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 final time you dropped $one hundred fifty in a vending machine? That’s the form of expense we’re speaking about. As batshit because the economics of the PicturePhone had been, Bell’s goal was to construct a $1 Billion company - 100,000 PicturePhones in the primary five years; 1,000,000 by 1980; 12,000,000 by 2000. Despite making an ideal piece of equipment and actually dazzling the technorati of the time by making it work effectively over old, twisted copper wire, that was by no means going to occur.

Today, it’s straightforward to ask why Bell wouldn’t have just subsidized the product within the early days to build the market. The reply is regulation. On the time, Bell owned a lot of the infrastructure - the community over which the PicturePhone was transmitting. Taking a loss on the device to lock in clients would have triggered a large antitrust case, and effectively, back then firms really cared about that kind of factor and so did the federal government. So, the PicturePhone was compelled to be exorbitantly expensive. Though an financial misfit, the PicturePhone was a superb 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 help it. Several years earlier than the PicturePhone was released, Bell produced a movie representing their view of the future, known as Seeing the Digital Future, which anticipated so much of today’s digital and web-driven tradition.

Creating the PicturePhone allowed them to experiment with among the interactions they expected would change into commonplace, whereas additionally demonstrating the necessity for upgraded infrastructure. That Bell engineers were able to ship a system that transmitted stable sound and image over present telelphone lines was extraordinary. That they had been able to create such a compact, desk-prepared system that was compatible with the telephones already sitting on them was also. That the PicturePhone had a digicam 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 internet expertise. Fluid and frequent digital connections between individuals, absolutely, porn but additionally the multimedia nature of how we trade information at present. Bell added video to what had been an entirely auditory connection expertise up to now, however they also built add-ons to attach PicturePhone to mainframe computers, share slides over the display, and even a mirror module that may allow the unit’s camera to broadcast documents you had in your desk.

Undeniably cool, though admittedly niche for the time. Bell hoped that gaining a country’s value of subscribers would force a nationwide upgrade in digital infrastructure. As it might prove, even the web, as we understand it immediately, wouldn’t do that. We'd should distribute credit score for making the typical American perceive the necessity for fiber optic cable among a diverse constituency - from Google to Pornhub. Pricing and infrastructure might be blamed for what would become a $500 million loss for Bell Telephone. Even that number doesn’t actually describe how much of a misfire the PicturePhone was in contrast with the truth that in the first 6 months, solely 12 prospects subscribed to the service, and by the time it was formally canceled, it had precisely zero of those prospects left. But even in 1970, there were more than 12 individuals wealthy sufficient to be early adopters. So why didn’t they?