Courtesy of Index Press

Cyberfeminism Index

On June 15th at 6:30pm, Space.City will host a keynote by designer and editor Mindy Seu’s Cyberfeminism Index. The event will feature a performative reading by Seu, followed by a panel discussion.

In Cyberfeminism Index, hackers, scholars, artists, and activists of all regions, races and sexual orientations consider how humans might reconstruct themselves by way of technology. When learning about internet history, we are taught to focus on engineering, the military-industrial complex, and the grandfathers who created the architecture and protocol, but the internet is not only a network of cables, servers, and computers. It is an environment that shapes and is shaped by its inhabitants and their use.

Edited by designer, professor, and researcher Mindy Seu, it includes more than 700 short entries of radical techno-critical activism in a variety of media, including excerpts from academic articles and scholarly texts; descriptions of hackerspaces, digital rights activist groups, and bio-hacktivism; and depictions of feminist net art and new media art. Both a vital introduction for laypeople and a robust resource guide for educators, Cyberfeminism Index—an anti-canon, of sorts—celebrates the multiplicity of practices that fall under this imperfect categorization and makes visible cyberfeminism’s long-ignored origins and its expansive legacy.

Meet the Panelists:

Photo by Philip Zhou

Mindy Seu is a designer and technologist based in New York City, currently teaching as an Assistant Professor at Rutgers Mason Gross School of the Arts and Critic at Yale School of Art. Her expanded practice involves archival projects, techno-critical writing, performative lectures, and design commissions. Mindy’s ongoing Cyberfeminism Index, which gathers three decades of online activism and net art, was commissioned by Rhizome and presented at the New Museum in its online form, and its print form is a recipient of a Graham Foundation Grant.

Kemi Adeyemi is Associate Professor of Gender, Women and Sexuality Studies at the University of Washington. She is the author of Feels Right: Black Queer Women & the Politics of Partying in Chicago (Duke University Press, 2022) and co-editor of the volume Queer Nightlife(University of Michigan Press, 2021). Kemi founded and directs The Black Embodiments Studio, an arts writing incubator, public programming initiative, and publishing platform dedicated to building discourse around contemporary black art.

Anna Lauren Hoffmann is an Associate Professor with The Information School at the University of Washington, as well as a senior fellow with the Center for Applied Transgender Studies and a founding member of the UW iSchool's AfterLab, a research group dedicated to the critical and cultural study of information, data, and archives in times of crisis, upheaval, and transition. Her work has appeared in New Media & Society, Information, Communication, & Society, The Los Angeles Review of Books, and Convergence: The International Journal of Research Into New Media Technologies.