The Cyberfeminism Index

[Vasundhara Mathur] Our final panelist is Mindy Seu. Mindy is a designer and technologist based in New York City and Los Angeles. Her expanded practice involves archival projects, techno-critical writing, performative lectures, design commissions, and close collaborations. Her latest writing surveys feminist economies, historical precursors of the metaverse, and the materiality of the internet. Mindy’s ongoing Cyberfeminism Index, which gathers three decades of online activism and net art, was commissioned by Rhizome, presented at the New Museum, and awarded the Graham Foundation Grant. She has lectured internationally at cultural institutions (Barbican Centre, New Museum), academic institutions (Columbia University, Central Saint Martins), and mainstream platforms (Pornhub, SSENSE, Google), and been a resident at MacDowell, Sitterwerk Foundation, Pioneer Works and Internet Archive. Her design commissions and consultation include projects for the Serpentine Gallery, Canadian Centre for Architecture and MIT Media Lab. Her work has been featured in Frieze, Vanity Fair, Dazed, Gagosian Quarterly, Brooklyn Rail, i-D and more. Mindy holds an MDes from Harvard’s Graduate School of Design and a BA in Design Media Arts from the University of California, Los Angeles. As an educator, Mindy was formerly an Assistant Professor at Rutgers Mason Gross School of the Arts and Critic at Yale School of Art. She is currently an Associate Professor at University of California, Los Angeles in the Department of Design Media Arts.

[Mindy Seu] Hi everyone. I am joining from Los Angeles. I just wanted to say thank you so much to Vasundhara and the Tate team for bringing us all together. Really great to start off this panel with Aleema’s Manifesto, followed by Abeera’s more granular overview of their research. I’m also going to do the same to a different degree, maybe also based on language very much focused on technology.

Girls need modems. Rosie Cross, a gender changer, figures out how her computer works and she is not afraid of breaking it apart. Gender Changers Academy. This glitch is a correction to the machine, Legacy Russel. So what you’re seeing now is a very rapid spread by spread overview of the Cyberfeminism Index, which is a publication that came out, in early 2022. I’m going to talk through, not the contents of this publication, but rather, all the different ways it’s manifested over the past five years, since late 2018. You can see that I’m currently sharing on a browser. So this is part of a much longer presentation, and I’m just going to scrub through key components quickly. But that means you can also visit it on your own if you want slides or references. So that’s mindyseu.com/sharing. And I also have kind of a cold. So, bear with me if my voice cracks.

I like presenting from the browser because it really shows some of this work in its native environment. So if you were to right click on the browser, you’ll have this, the source code appear. And this also is the HTML lecture notes, that you can visit on your own. This lecture’s HTML comments was inspired by the lecture given by Emma Rae Norton for Melanie Hoff’s School for Poetic Computation course, so you can view their lecture HTML comments here.

I have long been a gatherer, and though we rarely hear this word used literally anymore, we do hear its sister, gathering. We’re in a gathering today, but the term gatherer, we more immediately associate with our origins as hunter-gatherers. We went, we gathered goods and then returned home to our kin, sharing as survival. These were some of the opening words of an essay I wrote called ‘On Gathering’ for the Knight Foundation, and that link is also here. ‘Before the tool that forces energy outward. We made the tool that brings energy home. Prior to the preeminence of sticks, swords, and the hero’s killing tools, our ancestors’ greatest invention was the container, the basket of wild oats, the medicine bundle, the home, the bag of stars.’ So this was written by Ursula K. Le Guin in the mid 80s called the Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction. And it’s interesting how apt this book feels today after thirty-five years.

I like this because it basically posits that the first tool was not the spear, which is a tool of dominance, but rather the basket, which is a tool of gathering. So, as curators, as researchers, as collectors, as we consider what disparate items we’re bringing together, we’re also considering what container they live in, whether a website, book exhibition, home, etc., but also how they can be activated through some sort of social gathering.

So today, I’m going to walk you through some of the different gatherings. Cyberfeminism Index. The first was the spreadsheet. Just because we are a bit short on time, I’m not going to delve too deeply into these, but basically we were noticing that if you look at the top here, like Free Libre, open source software.

Oops, I just clicked out. That’s the danger of using a browser. Hold on one second. Sorry about this. All of the green are the media types, but if you scroll through, wow, sorry, my browser is very buggy today. You’ll see that things don’t fit neatly into individual categories because spreadsheets kind of encourage this, x and y axis that doesn’t allow for the blurriness in between categories, or the ability for individual authors to self-identify their categories. So we actually realised that this was actually not an appropriate format, even though it was a very effective crowdsourcing tool.

I’ve also embedded some channels in here. This is from Are.na called Radical Google Docs. It shows other people who’ve used Google Docs and Google Sheets as a way to collect all these different resources to create guides, for different social movements, to subvert the usage of these tools, etc. I also give a brief overview of the spreadsheet history of if you’re interested. So one of the early precursors for the internet was actually, the Talmud, which is the religious and theological doctrine of Judaism. So this here is Ted Nelson. He is the inventor of the concept of hypertext or hyperlinks. And he is holding up a page of the Talmud where it’s basically showing a dialectic of different voices on the page. You have the Mishnah, you have commentaries on the Mishnah, and you have commentaries on the commentary.

So, built into the structure of this page was this idea of a multiplicity of voices. Some of the early precursors for hyperlinks are often in digital or in analog form. So here we have a cross-reference in the Whole Earth Catalog that also showed how you can jump between pages of a book, therefore surfing or clicking through the book. The third version of this project was the website.

So, if you were to go to cyberfeminismindex.com, you would have this site that feels blurry but snaps to what appears to be a fairly standard table. But upon interaction, it’s made to feel unusual. So, breaking the convention of what a table might be. This green glow appears as you click intuitively or intentionally it’s added to the side panel, which you can then see associations between your selections. We also have these cross-references that connect different entries to each other. More so after you make your selections, you can then download this as a PDF. You can purchase the Cyberfeminism Index as a book, but you can also select whatever you want from the index and print out your own reader.

For us, it was really important to consider, to kind of switch this emphasis between what is considered a legitimising document. Typically, books are seen as more authoritative and more stable, whereas websites are maybe more ephemeral. But in this case, the website really acts as a living index that’s constantly crowdsourced, whereas the book acts as a snapshot of a moment of the website’s mutation. And that looks like this.

There were also various activations of this book using augmented reality, which I won’t show you today, but there’s also links embedded here. I also wanted to just share some concrete examples of what this book actually includes. This is one of the artifacts from a 1996 website called Brutal Myths by Sonya Rapoport and Marie-José Sat.

All of these are excerpts from their respective net art pieces or publications. Beginning with the biblical story of Eve, Brutal Myths describes the evil herbs that contaminated the minds of men and made them believe in the dictums laid forth in the Malleus Maleficarum. Then the participants plant a blissful garden of blessed herbs to destroy prejudicial myths about women.

This was the banner of CyberPowWow by Skawennati, one of the first indigenous online networks from 1997. CyberPowWow is an experiment that began when we realised what an awesome tool the World Wide Web is for people who want to share ideas, images, and imaginings. The first CyberPowWow was the launch of a web page dedicated to issues of contemporary native art. This is an image still from Martine Syms’s LP, but the quote is actually from their manifesto from 2013 called ‘The Mundane Afrofuturist Manifesto’.

‘This dream of utopia can encourage us to forget that outer space will not save us from injustice, and that cyberspace must prefigure it upon a “master/slave” relationship. While we are often othered, we are not aliens. And though our ancestors were mutilated, we are not mutants. Post-black is a misnomer. Postcolonialism is too. The most likely future is one in which we have only ourselves and this planet.’ I also just wanted to highlight this binary of master and slave. This kind of language of colonialism is embedded to become the default of various tools that we use.

For example, until 2021, the Python programming language used the terminology master and slave to describe nested information or nested coding structures. Similarly, in InDesign, Photoshop, or any of the Adobe Creative Suite tools, the primary template was called the master page that you could clone to create children pages. This was later changed to the parent page with the disclaimer about how we must continue to examine these terms that are embedded in our tools. I’ll just read through maybe two more of these, just for the sake of time.

This is an artifact, a render by Andy Kurovets. This excerpt is from ‘The Fetish of the Click: A Small History of the Computer Mouse as Vulva’ by Ali Na in 2017.

‘Sadie Plant wrote, “Disks are sucked into the dark recesses of welcoming vaginal slits, console cowboys jack into cyberspace, and virtual sex has been defined as ‘teledildonics’.” By claiming the computer mouse as vulva, possibilities of bodies and sexual experiences are made multiple. Instead of jacking in, the vulva mouse clicks, offering the power of the click or clit.’

And this is one of my favorite artifacts by Gash Girl from 1993. It was sitting on the bottom of a webpage: two male symbols and two female symbols forever entwined. This was accompanied by a quote from Gash Girl, aka Francesca da Vermini: ‘Stop fingering my separating holes, extending my oozing boundary. But in cipherspace, there are no bounds, or so they say. But in spiralspace, there is no they...there is only us.’

So it’s nice to have this arc of presentations today. Thank you so much for curating this, Vasundhara. It seems that we really have this overarching, liberating manifesto about how we can think about archives. We have a more technical study about how these analogue scripts can live in a digital space, and similarly, how we can share these born-digital artifacts within both digital and analog spaces. Really looking forward to this panel. Thank you so much.