about phono-post

The Phono-Post online audio-visual archive represents the first systematic attempt to document an astonishingly important yet surprisingly neglected moment in media history: the practice of sending individually recorded audio messages as acoustic letters via the mail. The product of a multi-year research project directed by Prof. Thomas Y. Levin (Princeton University) at the Friedrich Schlegel Graduate School for Literary Studies at the Freie Universität Berlin, and generously funded by the Einstein Foundation (Berlin), the ongoing endeavor is both amassing and making available to scholars a vast archive of these highly fragile, rapidly disappearing and unique multi-media artefacts.