The technologist and professor Mindy Seu was having drinks when her pal casually referred to the cellphone as a intercourse toy. Give it some thought, her pal, Melanie Hoff, defined: We ship nudes or watch porn, it’s vibrating and touch-sensitive — it’s virtually an appendage.
“What exactly is sex, and what exactly is technology?” Seu puzzled. “Neither can be cleanly defined.”
Across the similar time, in 2023, Seu had simply revealed “Cyberfeminism Index,” a viral Google Sheet-turned-Brat-green-doorstopper from Stock Press. Critics and digital subcultures embraced the area of interest quantity like a manifesto — and a marker of Seu’s arrival as a public mental whose archiving was itself a type of activism. The cool design didn’t harm. “If you’re a woman who owns a pair of Tabis or Miistas, you are going to have this tome,” joked comic Brian Park on his tradition podcast “Middlebrow.”
Nonetheless, the knot between sexuality and know-how tugged at her. “Recently, my practice has evolved toward technology-driven performance and publication,” she mentioned. “It’s not exactly traditional performance art, but I believe that spaces like lectures and readings can be made performative.” Although she wasn’t but completed exploring this theme, she wasn’t positive the right way to strategy it subsequent — till an experiment by Julio Correa, a former Yale graduate pupil, sparked an concept. Correa had devised an Instagram Tales-based lecture format, and she or he instantly noticed its potential. She reached out to ask if she might “manipulate” his concept right into a efficiency piece, and would he wish to collaborate?
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Thus, “A Sexual History of the Internet” was born. The work is 2 issues directly: a participatory lecture-performance carried out via the viewers’s telephones, and an accompanying, palm-sized, 700-plus-page “script” analyzing how our gadgets function bodily extensions.
The e-book isn’t exhaustive however as an alternative a curated miscellany of non-sequiturs and the form of dinner-party lore Seu delights in. Do you know that the anatomical construction of the clitoris wasn’t absolutely mapped till a decade after the invention of the World Broad Internet? Or that the primary JPEG — launched in 1992 at USC — cribbed a Playboy centerfold nicknamed “Lenna,” which journalist and the creator of the 2018 “Brotopia” Emily Chang known as “tech’s original sin.”
The metaverse, web3 and AI — none of that is new, Seu mentioned in her loft this previous Saturday, hours earlier than her West Coast debut on the Geffen Modern at MOCA. “But understanding the arc is helpful, especially how it’s tied to militaristic origins rooted in power, and how those same people were also confronted with sexuality.”
She’s simply returned from a whirlwind tour — Antwerp, New York, Oslo, Madrid — with Tokyo subsequent month. She splits her time between L.A. and Berlin, the place her boyfriend lives, however for now, she’s staying put in what she calls her “bachelor pad on the set of a ‘90s erotic thriller,” inherited from a friend, the artist Isabelle Albuquerque.
The floor-to-ceiling windows high in a historic Brutalist artists’ complicated overlook MacArthur Park and the downtown skyline. She’s offset the constructing’s cement with a childhood child grand piano and her grandmother’s lacquer self-importance with pearl inlay. That Seu marries the female and the spartan in her house feels intentional — a mirrored image of the dualities that animate her life and work.
“A Sexual History of the Internet” by Mindy Seu
(Pictures by Tim Schutsky | Artwork route by Laura Coombs)
Although she moved from New York three years in the past, she resists calling herself an Angeleno — partly, she admits, as a result of she by no means realized to drive regardless of rising up in Orange County. Her mother and father ran a flower store after immigrating from South Korea. The family was conservative, Presbyterian and promoted abstinence. Like with many millennials, her sexual awakening unfolded on-line.
“I asked Jeeves how to have an orgasm,” she writes. “I sexted with classmates on AOL Instant Messenger. Any curiosities were saved until I could sneak onto my family’s shared ice blue iMac G3 in the living room.”
At 34, the very-online educational holds a grasp’s from Harvard’s Graduate Faculty of Design and has taught at Rutgers and Yale earlier than becoming a member of her alma mater, UCLA, as one of many youngest tenured professors (and maybe the one one who has modeled for JW Anderson and Helmut Lang). Her first three years at UCLA have every had their crises — encampments, fires, ICE raids — but her Gen Z college students give her hope. “They’re so principled and motivated, even if it’s in a nihilistic way,” she mentioned.
On-line, followers declare their “brain crushes” on Seu, whose ultra-detailed spreadsheets have grow to be unlikely catnip for TikTok. Self-importance Truthful dubbed her the uncommon cybernaut who “lands soft-focus photoshoots in niche lifestyle publications.” Her uncommon energy is the flexibility to maneuver via totally different fields, Trojan-horsing her theories throughout academia, the artwork world, the lit scene, tech, trend, et al. Sue’s notoriety continued to swell after showing on the favored web speak present “Subway Takes” with the standout zinger: “Gossip is socially useful, especially to women and the marginalized.”
“Mindy’s really good at bridging different audiences who might not read an academic text about the history of the internet but are interested in Mindy’s practice,” mentioned Correa, Seu’s student-turned-collaborator. When the 2 workshopped their efficiency final yr on their finsta (a.ok.a. pretend Instagram), they encountered one main hurdle: censorship. They needed to get artistic with their algospeak (like altering “sex” to “s*x”) to maintain from getting banned.
Mindy Seu in her MacArthur Park loft.
(Carlin Stiehl / For The Instances)
“A Sexual History of the Internet,” designed by Laura Coombs, carries that collaborative ethos into its monetary construction. Seu’s first e-book went via conventional publishing, the place authors typically obtain about 10% and contributors obtain mounted charges. This time, she wished a quotation mannequin that compensated the 46 thinkers who formed her understanding of the topic.
She approached Yancey Strickler, director of Metalabel, “an indie record label for all forms of culture,” and co-founder of Kickstarter. Seu’s unique proposal waived all income to collaborators. “Everyone got paid but her,” Strickler mentioned. If she wished the mannequin to be replicated, he instructed her, it wanted a capitalist spine.
They landed on Citational Splits, the place everybody who was cited joined a 30% income pool, in perpetuity, throughout future printings (27 opted in). The remaining 60% goes to Seu and 5 core collaborators. Strickler likened it to music royalties or firm shares: “Your presence increases the project’s value, and some of that value should flow back to you.”
Neither can identify a publishing precedent. “It shows a profound, practical morality that underlies her work,” he mentioned.
At MOCA, about 300 Angelenos braved an atmospheric river to sit down within the darkened former police automobile warehouse bathed in crimson gentle. No projector, no highlight. A pair of Tabis winks at her all-black-clad pal; a pair holds fingers as Seu strikes via the room. (“I intentionally wear very noisy shoes,” she mentioned earlier.)
The viewers reads in unison when their designated colour seems. What follows is a refrain of anecdotes, artworks and historic fragments tracing the pervasive — and typically perverted — roots of our on a regular basis applied sciences. Listening to women and men say “click and clitoris” collectively is its personal spectacle.
“From personal websites to online communities, cryptocurrencies to AI, the internet has been built on the backs of unattributed sex workers,” one slide notes. Intercourse work has lengthy been an early adopter of rising know-how — from VHS to the web — and the current isn’t any exception. Two years in the past, OnlyFans creators made extra money than the whole NBA wage mixed; as we speak, the corporate now generates extra income per worker than Apple or Nvidia.
Seu ends with the extensively identified dominatrix Mistress Harley’s idea of information domination, a subset of BDSM wherein her “subs” (a.ok.a. submissives) grant her distant entry to their machines. Seu tells the group that she has primarily completed the identical, “viewing the voyeurs” and taking images of us all through the efficiency, that are already posted to Instagram.
We stroll out into the darkish rain, questioning what precisely we witnessed — and realizing, maybe, we’ve been witnessing all of it alongside.
