Camila is a research-based visual artist, writer, and experimental filmmaker living in New York.

Camila Galaz is a Chilean-Australian artist, writer, and filmmaker born in Adelaide and based in New York. Working through multimodal research-based projects which interweave historical and semi fictional personal stories with layers of academic and literary references, her practice looks to understand the process of building identity and knowledge through mediated sources and cultural texts.

Camila

Ana is a UK-based web developer and director of 

Ana Meisel is a web developer and net art curator from Czechia, based in London, UK. She specialises in building websites for artists, designers, writers and publishers as part of 

, an online exhibition space for new net art, and teaches design at Goldsmiths, University of London.

A podcast exploring alternative computing histories and their relationship to society. Hosted by 

 at the University of Colorado at Boulder.

Join us on Saturday, April 20 at 12pm ET in the 

 to celebrate the launch of our new zine! We will be joined by 

, Rhizome's Community Designer, where we'll discuss alternative tech history, lessons we've learned over the course of the podcast’s four seasons, and our favourite tech initiatives. This event also marks the second anniversary of OFtC!

for a Google calendar invitation for this online event.

Rhizome is hosting our zine launch event!

We just helped launch the 4th issue of the 

 ephemerMAL zine!

Using an image from MAL's archive "The Myths of Information" as inspiration, we asked the questions 

- “what in your daily life are some myths of how technology can better your material well-being?"

- using the quote from a 1982 review of the book as an additional guide: "technological innovations should be studied not as simple contributions to material well-being, but as interacting profoundly with the existing culture”

ephemerMAL Zine #4

Excited to announce we are working as part of a research group called Superkilogirls with 

Forthcoming Collaboration...

:
- World Top 20 Companies by Market Capitalization in 1989 and 2019: 

https://www.funalysis.net/economy-times-are-changing-world-top-20-companies-by-market-capitalization-in-1989-and-2019


- The rise & fall of Japanese phone giants: 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=voyuy1rySX4


- The Origin and Spread of Mobile Phones: 

https://web-japan.org/kidsweb/hitech/mobile/mobile01.html


- You can send email from payphones in Japan?!? We try the technology trick that shocked the nation: 

https://soranews24.com/2019/10/31/you-can-send-email-from-payphones-in-japan-we-try-the-technology-trick-that-shocked-the-nation/


- Sharp's awesome-looking Aquos 912SH TV-phone: 

https://www.techdigest.tv/2007/05/sharps_awesomel.html

Ana tells Camila about the flashing success of early Japanese smartphone tech. The girls discuss how the Japanese tech giants of the '90s and early '00s created exceedingly advanced and snazzy smartphone features and how such phones warranted the creation of the "second internet”. Circling the debate around Japan’s “economic miracle”, they talk about the politics and interrelation with the US that came after WW2.

Mobile Phones

i-mode and Japanese mobile internet


- Nokia “Distinctly Bold” Campaign: 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XG1JDYUrBUM


- Bramston, Dave, “Basics product design: Idea Searching”, 2008, Bloomsbury Academic
- De Giovanni, Pietro, “Cases of Circular Economy in Practice”, 2022, IGI Global
- Hjorth, Larissa, “Mobile media in the Asia Pacific : gender and the art of being mobile”, Routledge, 2009
- Katz, James E. and Sugiyama, Satomi, “Mobile Phones as Fashion Statements: The Co-creation of Mobile Communication’s Public Meaning”, 2005
- Shade, Leslie Regan, “Feminizing the Mobile: Gender Scripting of Mobiles in North America”, Continuum, 21:2, 2007, pp. 179-189
- 

https://www.mobilephonemuseum.com/phone-detail/nokia-7380

https://www.mobilephonemuseum.com/phone-detail/nokia-7280

https://www.theregister.com/2006/09/05/nokia_l_amour_collection/

We’re back chatting about the early 2000s Nokia “Fashion Phones”! These phones preferenced a positioning of mobile phones as a fashion accessory, or fashion statement, over technological functionality. Following from the first two episodes of the season, Ana and Camila discuss gendered product design and marketing, aesthetic obsolescence, what “retro” really means, and why Nokia may have had an interest in creating these “experimental” designs in the first place.

Fashion Phones and L'Amour


- Fisher, C. S. 1992. America calling: A social history of the telephone to 1940. Berkeley: University of California Press.

- Hanson, E. 1995. The telephone and its queerness. In Cruising the performative: Interventions into the representation of ethnicity, na­ tionality, and sexuality, edited by E. A. Case. Bloomington: Indi­ ana University Press.

- Moyal, A. 1992. The gendered use of the telephone: An Australian case study. Media, Culture, and Socieh J 14:51-72.

- O'Keefe, G., and Sulanowski, B.1995. More than just talk: Uses, gratifications, and the telephone. Journalism and Mass Communications Quarterly 72(4):922-933.

- Rakow, L. 1992. Gender on the line: Women, the telephone, and community life. Urbana: University of Illinois Press.

- Arafeh, S. 2000. Chapter Five: Women, Telephones, and Subtle Solidarity: A Counternarrative. Counterpoints Journal. Peter Lang AG. 

https://www.jstor.org/stable/42976096?read-now=1&seq=26#page_scan_tab_contents

https://www.retrowow.co.uk/retro_collectibles/80s/mobile_phone.html#:~:text=The 8500X had an alphabetic,than the 8000X and 8000S

- Sallyedelstein. 2015. The Telephone and the Housewife. Envisioning The American Dream 

https://envisioningtheamericandream.com/2015/12/22/the-telephone-and-the-housewife/

Although telephones were instated into the home as a business communication tool, the women of the house soon appropriated the technology for “sociability” - checking in with family and friends, gossiping, chatting and connecting with the community. Ana and Camila aptly chit-chat about how this phenomenon became so pronounced over the years that it shaped the evolution of phones and outlined the ways in which we use phones now.

The Real Housewives of Bell Telephone

00:00:14:01 - 00:00:16:22
Hi. Welcome to our friend the computer.

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We are a computer history podcast.

00:00:20:09 - 00:00:23:03
I'm here with my lovely co-host, Ana.

00:00:24:21 - 00:00:26:07
And we're here for our second

00:00:26:07 - 00:00:29:10
episode of our third season,
which is about mobile

00:00:29:10 - 00:00:32:12
phones or cell phones,
depending on where you are in the world.

00:00:32:19 - 00:00:33:23
I am back from Chile.

00:00:33:23 - 00:00:37:20
I was in Chile for a few weeks
doing an exhibition and I gave

00:00:37:20 - 00:00:41:20
my first artist talk in Spanish,
which I'm really happy about.

00:00:41:20 - 00:00:43:14
Amazing. How did it. Go?

00:00:44:19 - 00:00:45:24
I mean, I saw the question.

00:00:46:17 - 00:00:50:07
Well, so I prepared a speech,

00:00:50:07 - 00:00:53:09
essentially, like I wrote it in Spanish
and then read it.

00:00:54:02 - 00:00:59:23
And then we did like a Q&A
in, I would say Spanglish it.

00:01:00:24 - 00:01:03:07
I answered in English. Okay.

00:01:03:16 - 00:01:06:02
I just
I don't know. I couldn't. It's hard.

00:01:06:02 - 00:01:07:19
They were very complicated,

00:01:07:19 - 00:01:11:13
like amazing questions, but a little too
complicated for me to answer

00:01:12:24 - 00:01:16:13
in Spanish properly and within time
limits.

00:01:16:13 - 00:01:17:18
I think I talk.

00:01:17:18 - 00:01:21:09
I don't have as many vocab
words in Spanish as I do in English,

00:01:21:09 - 00:01:23:21
and so it takes me a lot more words
to be able to say what I mean.

00:01:24:16 - 00:01:27:21
And it was like a seminar at a university.

00:01:27:21 - 00:01:30:12
So I had a limited time, but it was great.

00:01:30:12 - 00:01:35:03
I'm glad that I started my journey of,
of professional Spanish speaking,

00:01:36:21 - 00:01:40:15
But yeah, and I also saw the Syverson

00:01:40:23 - 00:01:45:09
project Syverson
Recreation Room Recreation,

00:01:45:09 - 00:01:49:17
which we should probably talk
about that on our bonus episode.

00:01:49:17 - 00:01:51:10
Oh yeah, you really think about that.

00:01:51:10 - 00:01:53:16
So that leads nicely into that.

00:01:53:16 - 00:01:57:11
We have a patriot and come
join us on Patriot, where we're posting

00:01:57:19 - 00:02:03:11
extra content, including a video
of us doing some like bonus

00:02:05:00 - 00:02:05:19
recordings like

00:02:05:19 - 00:02:09:15
Reflection on on our episodes.

00:02:09:24 - 00:02:13:14
And I really want to do a book club,
but this is all

00:02:14:07 - 00:02:16:17
this is all future, future stuff.

00:02:16:17 - 00:02:21:00
But come and join us
so that we have two different tiers.

00:02:21:00 - 00:02:22:00
It's pay what you wish.

00:02:22:00 - 00:02:27:02
Everyone gets the same stuff, but you get
to be a different fruit on that computer.

00:02:27:02 - 00:02:30:09
For each tier, which is an apple,
it was the obvious one.

00:02:30:09 - 00:02:33:03
But we also Apple is the.
Big one. BlackBerry.

00:02:33:03 - 00:02:35:04
But us, we have ACORN anyway.

00:02:35:04 - 00:02:38:20
It's cute
and it helps nourish the podcast.

00:02:39:12 - 00:02:41:21
It helps with food on our tables.

00:02:42:19 - 00:02:46:02
Fruit and nuts and our tables.

00:02:46:02 - 00:02:49:02
And then other than that,
come join us on social media.

00:02:49:11 - 00:02:51:21
I'm having fun with memes on Instagram
at the moment.

00:02:52:09 - 00:02:56:04
Yeah, Camila does like a meme around up
every Monday.

00:02:56:12 - 00:02:57:10
Every Monday, though.

00:02:57:10 - 00:02:58:17
I did miss last week.

00:02:58:17 - 00:03:00:11
Yeah, I know. I noticed that as.

00:03:00:11 - 00:03:01:17
I was traveling.

00:03:01:17 - 00:03:05:10
I was looking forward to it. I'm so sorry.

00:03:05:10 - 00:03:07:17
But now I have a real backlog of memes.

00:03:08:23 - 00:03:12:06
Last episode we were looking at Nokia

00:03:12:18 - 00:03:16:14
and the history of Nokia and Finland
and all of that.

00:03:16:14 - 00:03:19:04
What are we doing this episode? I know.

00:03:20:16 - 00:03:23:11
So this episode is going to have
a little bit

00:03:23:11 - 00:03:27:18
more theory than our usual ones,
which I'm kind of excited about.

00:03:27:24 - 00:03:29:23
I would have this theory switch up.

00:03:29:23 - 00:03:32:21
Yeah, I like theory too.

00:03:32:21 - 00:03:36:12
Yeah, we wanted to do a story
about women and telephones

00:03:36:12 - 00:03:40:07
and how the phone used to be
a business communication tool,

00:03:40:14 - 00:03:43:11
but once it was brought
into the domestic space

00:03:43:11 - 00:03:46:12
to kind of introduce
like this, you know, work

00:03:46:12 - 00:03:48:15
from home efficiency,

00:03:49:20 - 00:03:54:05
women started using the phone for chit
chat as cordless phones allowed,

00:03:54:05 - 00:03:57:02
you know, easier movement around the house

00:03:58:02 - 00:04:00:06
while doing domestic chores.

00:04:00:06 - 00:04:02:20
There's many other reasons
why I like the way

00:04:03:10 - 00:04:05:22
women stay at home women, right.

00:04:05:22 - 00:04:07:16
Is that the politically correct term?

00:04:10:14 - 00:04:12:19
women in the home, I don't know.

00:04:13:02 - 00:04:15:18
Also defined chit chat as well.

00:04:15:18 - 00:04:19:14
So like gossip, keeping in touch,

00:04:20:04 - 00:04:24:20
you know, fun, interesting conversations
that aren't really business related

00:04:24:20 - 00:04:27:12
but are maybe more leisure related

00:04:27:22 - 00:04:32:08
about the family
and friends and everything.

00:04:32:08 - 00:04:37:03
So, yeah, obviously the kind of social
aspect of phones today is massive.

00:04:37:03 - 00:04:40:02
Then I would say
even the kind of dominant use of phones

00:04:41:15 - 00:04:43:05
and housewives where the

00:04:43:05 - 00:04:45:18
instigator or founders of that,

00:04:47:07 - 00:04:52:00
Sadly, I haven't had much luck
and finding historical research on this,

00:04:52:00 - 00:04:55:20
which is also a little unsurprising to me
because, you know,

00:04:55:20 - 00:04:58:04
women in technology
are a little historically

00:04:58:04 - 00:05:02:00
underrepresented,
although that is changing.

00:05:02:00 - 00:05:06:02
And I emailed a couple of academics
who had mentioned this phenomenon

00:05:08:19 - 00:05:12:20
in search of some books or texts,
but yeah, no luck.

00:05:13:17 - 00:05:18:11
I did find, however,
a few academic texts that wrote about it,

00:05:18:11 - 00:05:21:15
but they also tended to mention that
there's not much reporting around this.


- Arthur, Charles, “Nokia's chief executive to staff: 'we are standing on a burning platform'”, The Guardian, 9 Feb 2011, 

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/blog/2011/feb/09/nokia-burning-platform-memo-elop


- Laaksonen, Teemu, "Is this real?" said Mikhail Gorbachev with a Mobira Cityman mobile phone in his hand”, YLE, 6 Dec 2020, 

https://yle.fi/aihe/artikkeli/2020/12/06/onko-tama-todellista-sanoi-mihail-gorbatsov-suomalainen-kannykka-kadessaan


- Lohr, Steve, “Risk Inherited at Finnish Concern”, The New York Times, 29 Dec 1988, 

https://www.nytimes.com/1988/12/29/business/risk-inherited-at-finnish-concern.html


- Montes de Oca, Bernardo, “What Happened To Nokia And How It's Still Alive”, Slidebean, 

https://slidebean.com/story/what-happened-to-nokia


- Vilpponen, Antti, “Nokia: Finland mourns the demise of its proud tech heritage”, The Guardian, 4 Sep 2013, 

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2013/sep/04/nokia-finland-microsoft-startups


- Wingfield, Nick, “Microsoft to Lay Off Thousands, Most From Nokia Unit”, The New York Times, 17 July 2014, 

https://www.nytimes.com/2014/07/18/business/microsoft-to-cut-up-to-18000-jobs.html


- “Microsoft, Nokia, and the burning platform: a final look at the failed Windows Phone alliance”, VentureBeat, 

https://venturebeat.com/mobile/microsoft-nokia-and-the-burning-platform-a-final-look-at-the-failed-windows-phone-alliance/


- “Portfolio Expansion”, Nokia World, 


- “The Nokia Mobira Cityman”, Microsoft Windows Blog, April 2012, 

https://blogs.windows.com/devices/2012/04/16/back-to-the-1980s-the-legendary-nokia-mobira-cityman-25-yrs-on/


- “Why do the names of Apple's products begin with ‘I’? Know the history of now-iconic letter”, The Economic Times, 24 Dec 2022, 

https://economictimes.indiatimes.com/news/new-updates/why-do-the-names-of-apples-products-begin-with-i-know-the-history-of-now-iconic-letter/articleshow/96478120.cms?from=mdr

We’re back for season 3! Cell phones! Camila and Ana chat about the history of Nokia (the town and the company), the connection between car phones and mobile phones, and 80s naming conventions. They also discuss Gorbachev's famous phonecall on the Nokia-Mobira Cityman—a PR stunt that led to the phone being nicknamed the “Gorba” in Finland.

Nokia and the Mobira Cityman

http://www.cs.otago.ac.nz/homepages/andrew/poly/Poly.htm

https://collection.motat.nz/objects/22214/computer-poly1

https://www.classic-computers.org.nz/collection/poly1.htm

https://www.creationz.co.nz/kiwinuggets/2007/03/poly-1-educational-computer_07.html

https://web.archive.org/web/20060424190744/http://www.stuff.co.nz/stuff/0,2106,3645342a28,00.html

http://www.ourdigitalheritage.org/archive/playitagain/the-poly-computer-nzs-purpose-built-school-computer/

https://twitter.com/PulpLibrarian/status/1644453795953246209

http://www.cs.otago.ac.nz/homepages/andrew/papers/2010-5.pdf

http://www.rutherfordjournal.org/article050106.html

The girls talk cricket before launching into the final episode of this Education Computers season! We're heading over to New Zealand and talking about the Poly-1. It's another homegrown micro computer destined for schools and funded by a government program, but this one was crushed by corporate (specifically... Apple) interference. Before its time (and 18 months before the BBC micro), we plot its rise and then its downfall which coincided with some pretty dark moments in recent history.

Edu-Computers

Poly-1


- Wierzbicki, Barbara, “Icon: Canada’s system for schools”, InfoWorld, 7 Nov 1983, 

https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=0C8EAAAAMBAJ&pg=PA33&redir_esc=y#v=onepage&q&f=false

https://www.old-computers.com/museum/computer.asp?st=1&c=971


- Eckert, Jason, “ Ontario’s Computer: The Burroughs ICON”, 3 Apr 2022, 

https://jasoneckert.github.io/myblog/icon-computer/

Camila and Ana chat about Canada’s first standardised and purpose-built computer for education, the Icon. Prior to launching in 1984, it made promises of a hypertext learning utopia where it simplified the lives of both students and teachers. The girls kick off by exploring the definition of failure (after Camila had gone to see the Minitel at the Museum of Failure), and end by discussing the criticisms of top-down government projects that stumped potential hypertext projects.

Icon

- Full BBC Computer Literacy Project archive: 


- Arthur, Charles. “How the BBC Micro started a computing revolution.” 

, Jan 10, 2012.
- Blyth, Tilly. “Computing for the Masses? Constructing a British Culture of Computing in the Home”. AICT-387, Springer, pp.231-242, 2012, IFIP Advances in Information and Communication Technology
- Blyth, Tilly. “The Legacy of the BBC Micro effecting change in the UK’s cultures of computing.” Nesta, May 2012. 

https://media.nesta.org.uk/documents/the_legacy_of_bbc_micro.pdf


- “David Bowie predicted in 1999 the impact of the Internet in BBC interview.” Youtube, uploaded by 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LaHcOs7mhfU


- Raspberry Pi Forums, The BBC Computer Literacy Project 2012, 

https://forums.raspberrypi.com/viewtopic.php?t=3102


- “The BBC Computer Literacy Project | The BBC at 100.” Youtube, uploaded by 

Camila is super excited about a children’s toy computer and then the girls chat about the BBC Computer Literacy Project from the 70s/80s. They discuss the TV programing which brought the need for it to the eyes of parliamentarians, how it built on previous literacy projects which combined TV shows with adult education curriculums, the creation of the BBC Micro computer and BBC Basic, and the state of computers in the mind of the public at the time. Are we in need of a new Computer Literacy Project for the modern age??

BBC Literacy Project


- Ames, Morgan G., “The Charisma Machine: The Life, Death, and Legacy of One Laptop per Child”, 2019, The MIT Press
- “The Charisma Machine: The Life, Death, and Legacy of One Laptop per Child, By Dr. Morgan G. Ames”, UNC African Studies Center, 2022, 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BCeaQUPaze4


- Robertson, Adi, "OLPC's $100 laptop was going to change the world — then it all went wrong", 2018, 

https://www.theverge.com/2018/4/16/17233946/olpcs-100-laptop-education-where-is-it-now


- “Nicholas Negroponte Interview - One Laptop per Child (OLPC)”, 2007, OLPCFoundation, 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o97UD78s6iM


- Cortés, Mariana Ludmila, “OLPC Announces Partnership with Zamora Teran Foundation”, 