Join us for a performative lecture and discussion to launch the Cyberfeminism Index. Seu will be joined in conversation with artist Lee Blalock. Edited by designer, professor, and researcher Mindy Seu, Cyberfeminism Index gathers more than 700 short entries of radical techno-critical activism, feminist manifestos, hackerspaces, hardware, and wetware education and net art from 1991 to 2020, starting with an excerpt from Donna Haraway’s seminal essay “A Cyborg Manifesto.” Its online complement, cyberfeminismindex.com (2020), is a living, online index that was commissioned by Rhizome and premiered with New Museum. Its print form, published by Inventory Press, was supported by a Graham Foundation grant in 2021. 

ABOUT CYBERFEMINISM INDEX
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.

Advance copies will be available for purchase in the Graham Foundation bookshop during the event. Pre-order copies are available now on inventorypress.com. Follow the international Cyberfeminism Index book launch tour on tour.cyberfeminismindex.com

Mindy Seu (b. 1991, California) gathers the histories of technology to analyze and inform contemporary society. Trained as a graphic designer, she works collaboratively across the disciplines of design, art, and technology to document overlooked voices. These projects are expressed in a variety of forms, from archival projects and techno-critical writing to performative lectures and resource sharing. Seu’s ongoing Cyberfeminism Index (cyberfeminismindex.com), which gathers three decades of online activism and net art from 1991 to the present, was commissioned by Rhizome and presented at the New Museum in its online form. Its print form, published by Inventory Press, is a recipient of a Graham Foundation grant. Her work is both technological and interdisciplinary, marking the ways that online environments intersect with issues of race, gender, culture, and power. She is regularly invited to present on alternative archival projects and contemporary feminism by cultural institutions (Barbican Centre, New Museum), academic institutions (Columbia University, Central Saint Martins), and mainstream platforms (Google, Pornhub, SSENSE). Seu has been a resident at MacDowell, Sitterwerk Foundation, Pioneer Works, and Internet Archive, and holds an M.Des. from Harvard University Graduate School of Design and a bachelor of arts in design media arts from the University of California, Los Angeles. She is currently assistant professor at Rutgers Mason Gross School of the Arts and critic at Yale School of Art.

Lee Blalock is a Chicago-based artist and educator presenting alternative and hyphenated states of being through technology-mediated processes. Interested in how technologies support the idea of impossible anatomies, behaviors, and performances, her work is an exercise in body modification by way of amplified behavior or "change-of-state". Lee’s interests include embodied cognition, anatomy and biomechanics, bionics, mechatronics, human/non-human entanglement, and computational abstraction. She has presented work domestically, internationally, and virtually at many institutions including Ars Electronica, the wrong biennale, NYU Abu Dhabi Art Gallery, Experimental Sound Studio (Chicago), ICA (Philadelphia), 205 Hudson Gallery (NY), and the Art Institute of Chicago. Lee is an Assistant Professor in the Art and Technology Studies Department at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and practices various forms of embodiment as an everyday athlete.

Cyberfeminism Index is published by Inventory Press and distributed by Distributed Art Publishers and funded by the Graham Foundation, Rhizome, and Feral File, and is made possible in part by the Rutgers University Research Council, Pratt Institute, Pioneer Works, and Cita Press.

Related Graham Foundation supported projects:
2021 grant to Mindy Seu for the publication Cyberfeminism Catalog