When did the videophone go from an exciting sci-fi idea to a boring corporate tool?

Way way back in the twentieth century, we imagined a future with flying cars, meals in pill form, and a videophone in every pocket. We’re still waiting on the flying cars, but video calls are a huge part of all of our lives now. A technology that once seemed far-fetched has become boring, even irritating. How did this happen? And what can we do about it?

In this lunchtime talk, Watershed’s Creative Technologist, Martin O’Leary, will walk us through the hundred-year history of video calling. He'll talk about the failed attempts, the weird experiments, and the artists who tried to turn video calls into something more interesting than a two-hour Zoom networking session.

Martin will also be sharing the work he’s been doing at Watershed to design better solutions for video networking. Watershed and the Pervasive Media Studio pride themselves in bringing people together, on sparking the random connections that lead to new ideas and collaborations. How can we do that when we can’t put two people in the same room together? And what kind of tools can we imagine that might support the future we want to build?

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