Thank you so much for the excellent question!! I’ve been meaning to answer this one for a while, so here goes.
My favourite ridiculous piece of 90s technology is PocketMail! It wasn’t that ridiculous at the time, but it’s definitely something that could have only existed in the late 1990s / early 2000s. I actually have a PocketMail device, an Oregon Scientific PM-32 that I found on the side of the road in a box full of broken landline telephones!
PocketMail devices were essentially very basic Personal Digital Assistants that allowed you to access your emails without having to use a computer with an internet connection! Here you can see the basic screen and buttons for composing, sending and receiving emails.
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But remember, this thing doesn’t have Wi-Fi – so how exactly can it access your emails? If you flip the device over, you’ll see a strange little speaker thing that flips out…
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That’s an acoustic coupler! You had to hold the device up to the handset of a landline telephone! So if you had a PocketMail account (with a special email address ending in @pocketmail.com) and were away from your computer/office, you could simply dial the phone number for the PocketMail service on the nearest landline telephone, then hold the device up to the handset so that it can send and receive email data with the email server in the form of audio – and presto! You have just sent an angry last-minute email to your intern for neglecting to look after your Tamagotchi while you were on a business trip to sell Y2K survival kits.
But… what did it sound like? The phone service has long since been shut down after the rise of more capable and portable internet-connected devices, but if you press the little ‘Mail’ button on the top of the device, you can still hear the sounds of this poor, obsolete little thing trying to reach out and communicate in the only way it knows how to:
[image description: pickman and marn at a fruit&veg stall in a dusty market. pickman is looming darkly and making the drakkan stallkeeper sweat. marn is examining a fruit with care.]
Pretend, for example, that you were born in Chicago and have never had the remotest desire to visit Hong Kong, which is only a name on a map for you; pretend that some convulsion, sometimes called accident, throws you into connection with a man or a woman who lives in Hong Kong; and that you fall in love. Hong Kong will immediately cease to be a name and become the center of your life. And you may never know how many people live in Hong Kong. But you will know that one man or one woman lives there without whom you cannot live. And this is how our lives are changed, and this is how we are redeemed.
What a journey this life is! Dependent, entirely, on things unseen. If your lover lives in Hong Kong and cannot get to Chicago, it will be necessary for you to go to Hong Kong. Perhaps you will spend your life there, and never see Chicago again. And you will, I assure you, as long as space and time divide you from anyone you love, discover a great deal about shipping routes, airlines, earth quake, famine, disease, and war. And you will always know what time it is in Hong Kong, for you love someone who lives there. And love will simply have no choice but to go into battle with space and time and, furthermore, to win.
Indonesian fiber artist Mulyana has taken over the Fisher Museum of Art with colorful, hand-knitted and crocheted aquatic life.
With the duality of life and death as a recurring theme, Mulyana crafts a tactile, mystical world in which fish, whales, and coral reefs coexist with sea monsters and slow states of decay.
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