Mindy Seu: A Sexual History of the Internet
Sunday, August 23, 2026
8:00 pm - 8:00 pm
Event Details
In A Sexual History of the Internet, Mindy Seu curates a miscellany of artifacts, art, net lore, and historical anecdotes to explores the parallel development of digital technology and sexuality. A follow-up to her acclaimed Cyberfeminism Index(2023), the work exists simultaneously as a participatory live Instagram Stories-based lecture-performance and as a 700-page palm-sized artist book. It documents the ways everyday digital infrastructures are rooted in male desire and the uncredited labour of women and sex workers. Key examples include highlighting that JPEG image compression was first tested using a Playboycentrefold (referred to as ‘Lenna’), and that an early proto-internet operating system node was jokingly truncated as ‘Sex OS’. During Seu’s performance, there is no podium or spotlight. Instead, the audience logs into a shared script via their phones, reading the lecture’s historical citations and anecdotes aloud in unison, transforming a lecture into a polyvocal, collective chorus sharing these histories.
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Mindy Seu (b.1991) is an artist and technologist based in Los Angeles and New York. A Sexual History of the Internet (2025) follows her first book Cyberfeminism Index (2023), a pseudo-encyclopedia that gathers three decades of online activism and net art. A Sexual History of the Internet was commissioned by Rhizome, premiered at New York’s New Museum, and received a Graham Foundation Grant. Seu is an Associate Professor in the Department of Design Media Arts, University of California, Los Angeles.
Event Info
- Date: Sunday, August 23, 2026
- Time: 8:00 pm - 8:00 pm