The internet reflects aspects of reality, yet it also distorts and reshapes our experiences of it. Few artists and practitioners have traced these distortions as incisively as Mindy Seu. I became intrigued by Seu’s work for its engagement in three concepts I am deeply interested in: feminism, technology and performance art, both as activist art and what we might refer to as “pure art”. The American designer, researcher and technologist is often described as a technofeminist due to her work that critically examines the relationship between technology and gender dynamics, a kind of feminist technoscience critique. If you are online enough, you might have encountered her on comedian Kareem Rahma’s “Subway Takes”, sharing her take on gossip as a way to build trust, declaring that “One man’s sh*t talk is another woman’s safety net!”. Others might know her for her incredibly important work, ‘The Cyberfeminism Index’, a robust resource that began as a spreadsheet to trace and archive over 30 years of techno-critical activism and art.
To understand how her ideas translate into her projects, I met Seu online for an interview. I began our conversation by asking about the possibilities of the internet today, whether it still had the same kind of promise that it did in its early days and iterations. Seu pointed me to the clear shift in sentiment in conversations and theories about digital technologies that were framed, much earlier, in utopian terms. “I think when people were discussing the theories around this in the 90s, it [the internet] was very much shaped as an emancipatory, fantastical tool. Anything you can imagine could happen; it’s a global village, it will build connections, we will be removed from our bodies and really embrace the consciousness that humans inherit. You had a lot of language like this.” It soon became clear that this was not entirely true. “What we quickly learned is that the tools themselves are not going to emancipate us. It requires a consciousness shift first or in tandem. And I do see that happening to a certain degree with certain groups and communities”. She reminds me, though, that even in the ’90s, many people still felt excluded: they lacked access or they encountered the same racial dynamics online that they did offline, including race-based harassment and intensified sexism. Paradoxically, she notes that perhaps the broad consensus of a broken internet can be read as promising: if everyone agrees that the system isn’t working, that very recognition might be the condition that eventually forces it to collapse or transform. This broader critique leads directly into the principles driving her work.
Photo by Tim Schutsky, art direction by Laura Coombs
Seu’s latest project, ‘A Sexual History of the Internet’, is one of the clearest expressions of this ongoing inquiry. Existing as an artist book and a participatory lecture performance, the project reveals the pervasive and perverted origins of our digital tools. Beginning in September, Seu toured the performance (and will continue to) across New York, Los Angeles, Hong Kong, Berlin and Madrid, among others.
‘A Sexual History of the Internet’ uses the Instagram-Stories-as-Lecture format that was first conceived by Julio Correa and further developed by Seu. It is a participatory lecture performance told through audience phones, tapping into both online and offline formats to engage with digital culture. It takes place in a dark room where chairs are scattered, facing different directions to disturb the typical hierarchical format of the lecturer elevated on a podium (holder of knowledge and power) vs the seated student mass (receivers of knowledge). As the performer, Seu acts as a roaming narrator, moving through the space. The audience is instructed onto Instagram, where the script exists on the project’s Instagram page. Seu explains that “because everyone’s device loads at a slightly different speed, the slides appear a fraction of a second apart. With hundreds of phones, this creates a twinkling, flickering light effect across the room. The audio from each phone also falls out of sync, forming a layered, chaotic hum.” The work relies on a mix of scripted content and emergent collective behaviour. I’m struck by how it uses no special technology beyond a cellphone and a stable network connection, a very clear indication of reaching for low-tech, lo-fi, DIY ways of working. She tells me that the simplicity is what allows it to scale from small groups to very large ones.
Photo by Tim Schutsky, art direction by Laura Coombs
Seu’s innovation is not only in her performances but also in the models she builds around her work, in content, form and methodology. Things such as citation, multiplicity of voice, collaboration and experimentation are foundational. For instance, ‘A Sexual History of the Internet’, the book, is a kind of financial experiment where for every book sold, profit will be redistributed to those cited within. She uses a profit-splitting system to set aside a 30% pool specifically for people cited in the book. Anyone who is cited can opt in, and those who do share that pool equally. If someone opts out, their portion is redistributed to the others. The model is intentionally simple and yet proposes a way of tangibly recognising value, she explains; “We can choose where every penny of our projects goes if we try to reevaluate the system of how these projects emerge, which is why we moved away from a standard publishing model for this project.” This commitment to rethinking systems also shaped ‘The Cyberfeminism Index’. In all its forms, the index functioned as a gathering project. It brought together a wide range of media and time periods, covering themes from biotech, the open-source movement, cybernetic theory and much more. “Media-wise, it was intentionally broad, collecting syllabi, PDFs, net art, video art, hashtags, and any other relevant formats. This breadth created an entanglement of ideas, revealing how many people were thinking along similar lines even if their work manifested differently. A recurring theme was environmental impact, the most literal expression of materialism. Some artists and scholars experimented with low-tech websites, solar-powered servers, and other hands-on approaches, while others emphasised the heavy material demands of the internet itself: the energy and water consumed by server farms, the rare earth minerals mined under exploitative conditions and the seemingly boundless fibre-optic cables laid across the ocean floor,” she elaborates. Seu’s mention of fibre-optic cables opens a broader conversation about the historical violence embedded in the internet’s physical roots. As a kind of unconscious co-citation, I was reminded of Tabita Rezaire’s ‘Exotic Trade’ project, where she drew parallels between the layout of submarine optic cables, the very architecture of the internet, and colonial trade routes, to point to the powerful symbolism underpinning ‘electronic colonialism’ whereby the internet has literally been built on routes of Black pain. Perhaps then, this goes some way in explaining the inherent violence of these tools, but also maybe proposes a potential for rupture. Rezaire herself reminds us of complexity, contradiction and nuance when she claims;
Exotic Trade is love is anger is pain is healing on screens
Exotic Trade is hardrive memory is forgotten data is unearthed potential
Exotic Trade is a diagnosis is a remedy is caring
Exotic Trade is trying
Exotic Trade is for you is for us
Exotic Trade is sharing fluids of survival
Exotic Trade is wet and juicy love
Exotic Trade is harnessing the power of vibration
Exotic Trade is contradiction is complicity exposed
Exotic Trade is struggling with self-love
Exotic Trade is self-commodification is self-realisation is self-doubt
Exotic Trade is me for sell
Returning to Seu’s work, I wanted to understand why she chose the lens of sexuality to tell of history. She emphasised that these questions ultimately revolve around desire and techno embodiment. That, it is nearly impossible to separate our bodies from the technologies we use. Early examples in the archive focus on forms of extraction: a JPEG built from a Playboy model’s image, computer-generated art depicting nude women and similar cases. There are also conceptual works that trace the computer mouse’s evolution from the phallic light pen to the yonic mouse, using these shapes to frame technology metaphorically. The project also highlights contemporary accounts from sex workers who helped pioneer early cryptocurrencies, chat systems and streaming, further expanding this terrain. She stresses, though, that the point is not sex itself. It is power: how desire, fantasy, embodiment and the militaristic origins of the internet all intertwine. How our bodies in all their symbolic and material forms inhabit and shape the digital environment.
My conversation with Mindy reminded me that the body and the mind are inseparable and that our digital lives are inseparable from our physical ones, too.
To engage further with Mindy Seu’s work, you can go here: https://mindyseu.com/
Pioneer Works performance of A SEXUAL HISTORY OF THE INTERNET on September 20, 2025. Photo by Max Lakner, courtesy Pioneer Works
