Cyberfeminism Index

Edited and gathered by Mindy Seu
Inventory Press, 2022
Softcover, 6.75 × 9.5 in.
608 pages
$34.95 — Order Here

WPA Note:
Mindy Seu was an artist-organizer and designer for WPA’s inaugural symposium How can we gather now? (2023).

Description:
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.

The creation and use of the Cyberfeminism Index is a social and political act. It takes the name cyberfeminism as an umbrella, complicates it, and pushes it into plain sight. 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.

About the Editor:
Mindy Seu is a designer and technologist whose practice involves archival projects, techno-critical writing, performative lectures, and design commissions. Her latest writing surveys historical precursors of the metaverse and reveals the materiality of the internet. Seu’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. Its print form received a Graham Foundation grant. Seu holds an M.Des. from Harvard’s Graduate School of Design and a B.A. in Design Media Arts from UCLA. She is an Assistant Professor at Rutgers Mason Gross School of the Arts and a Critic at Yale School of Art.