Feminist Webs: Gathering Cyberfeminism(s)

A performative reading and lecture about the histories of cyberfeminism(s) and the making of the Cyberfeminism Index by Mindy Seu, supported by Readymag.

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 Cyberfeminism Index is a crowd-sourced collection that gathers three decades of global online activism and net art: hackers, scholars, artists, and activists of all regions, races and sexual orientations that consider how humans might reconstruct themselves by way of technology.

The creation and use of the online repository and accompanying book 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, technologist, 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, the 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.

Mindy Seu (she/they) 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.

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