Lecture & Performance

Cyberfeminism Index
sex is the world our desires produce

Mindy Seu
Melanie Hoff

October 7, 2023, 6pm
Géza, 306 Maujer

In conjunction with designer and editor Mindy Seu’s most recent publication Cyberfeminism Index, this event will feature an Augmented Reality-based performative reading by Mindy, followed by sex is the word our body bursts, a new performance by artist Melanie Hoff, one of the book’s contributors who addresses cyberfeminism through the lens of sexual possibility.

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. The publication 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.

Cyberfeminism Index; sex is the world our desires produce brings together two performances which conjure a relationship between hardware, software, and the body. Mindy combines reality and computer-generated images through the story of Cyberfeminism and its gathering of feminisms and technologies into conflict and conversation. In sex is the word our body bursts, Melanie reflects on the materiality of language across code, text, sound, and breath while embodying a sexual reproduction of ideas. This performance is supported by sound designer Philip Errico and visual designer Char Stiles.

Access to the ground-level event space and is step-free and wheelchair accessible. If you have a specific access requirement, please contact contact@amant.org

Photo by Harry Griffin, Art direction by Laura Coombs.

Mindy Seu is a designer and technologist based in New York City. 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, Dazed, Gagosian Quarterly, Brooklyn Rail, i-D, and more. Mindy holds an M.Des. from Harvard’s Graduate School of Design and a B.A. 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.
Melanie Hoff is an artist, organizer, and educator. As co-director of the School for Poetic Computation, and cofounder of Hex House. They strive to cultivate spaces of learning and feeling that encourage honesty, poetry and reconciliation for the ways we are shaped by intersecting systems of classification and power. Melanie engages hacking and performance to express the absurdities of these systems while revealing the encoded ways in which they influence how we choose to live and what choices have been made for us. They teach about sex, technology, and social cybernetics at the School for Poetic Computation, Yale University, New York University, and have shown work at the New Museum, the Queens Museum, and elsewhere.