[rohrpost] Lect. Tom Levin "Phonopost", 4 Dec, Museum für Kommunikation, Berlin

[Andreas Broeckmann]

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.