Oh. I am inspired and jealous of Aparna Rao’s skills. She’s taken an Olivetti typewriter and wired it so that it sends emails. You type, it appears on a piece of paper and when you pull the paper out, it sends.

In collaboration with Mathias Dalhström, 22 Pop was inspired by my mother’s own fruitless attempts to imbibe the practices and conventions of the ‘connected’ world, and her growing sense of despair and exclusion from all social exchanges that take place exclusively over email. To her, instant electronic communication is a fascinating idea and so close at hand; yet any attempt to use a computer leaves her feeling flustered and inadequate. A simple email operation is a daunting task. She is not alone in her misgivings and inability to keep abreast with digital technologies constantly in flux.

It’s worth going through the rest of the site where she describes in minute detail the process of doing this. I’ve toyed with the idea of wiring one of our typewriters so it can function as the input of a computer, but the design problems she ran into–including the conductivity of a whole machine is made of metal–have convinced me that I’m not up to the task. Meanwhile, I can admire her ingenuity.

This fellow had a similar idea with his No. 5 Underwood hack, but it’s not as elegant.