Einstein Lecture by Thomas Y. Levin
Phonopost: Rediscovering a Forgotten Chapter of Media History
(on the Media Archaeology of Voice Mail)
4 December 2012, 7pm
in the Museum für Kommunikation, Berlin
http://www.einsteinfoundation.de/de/meetingeinstein_thomaslevin.html
The spiral groove of the record, the brittle voices: gramophones are
normally remembered as the means our forefathers used to listen to
music. What is largely forgotten today is that gramophone discs also
served a very different purpose from the 1920s to 1950. People used it
to record private spoken letters that were then sent by mail - a
widespread form of communication known as "Phonopost". While already
imagined as a possibility by Thomas Alva Edison upon the invention of
the phonograph in 1877, extensive cultures of the Sprechbrief only
really developed with the advent of the flat gramophone record in the
early 20th century. In his lecture Einstein Visiting Fellow Thomas Levin
will present some key moments in this media archeology of voice mail and
will officially launch a new digital archive he has created for this
overlooked facet of media culture.
Thomas Levin is Associate Professor of German at Princeton University.
His research encompasses theoretical works on aesthetics as well as
comparative studies on old and new media. Since November 2010, the
renowned scholar, translator and curator has been Einstein Visiting
Fellow at the Friedrich Schlegel Graduate School of Literary Studies.
Together with his Berlin research group, Thomas Levin is reconstructing
the media archaeology of the acoustic letter. The "Phonopost" collection
and archive is the first landmark of this project.
--
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