How We Find It Again: An Interview with Mindy Seu
Anabelle Johnston
For designer and artist Mindy Seu, gathering and parsing information is an educational practice and an art form. With meticulous spreadsheets and PDF compilations, Seu documents alternative histories of web development and embodied digital practices. Her research project, the Cyberfeminism Index, collates much of this research, spiraling from an ever-growing spreadsheet to a searchable website to a physical encyclopedia, released in 2022. She graciously took my call in early January 2024 to discuss misusing tools, digital sex work, and letting ourselves forget.
This conversation has been edited for clarity and concision.
Anabelle Johnston: Obviously I'm a huge fan. I think I’ve read most of your recent interviews, both in preparation for this conversation and also for fun. I was really interested in the project that you mentioned in passerby, detailing how sex workers shaped the internet. I was wondering if you had any more information about that research, what drew you to that field and also the intended scope.
Mindy Seu: I use the word “sex workers” here very loosely. Is it only people who do in-person contact? Pornography? Camming? Chatting? Instagram models? It's quite expansive.
...sex workers are innovators, and they helped develop many of the tools and platforms that we use online.
Regardless, sex workers are innovators, and they helped develop many of the tools and platforms that we use online. Their labor is policed in mainstream contexts, and many sex workers are forced to move to or create other platforms. But their needs have set industry standards, and technologies such as chatting and pop-up advertising are ubiquitous now because of their early adoption. But there isn't a lot of accepted documentation to prove that sex workers have shaped the development of new technologies outside of oral history.
But the connection goes back to the days before digital recording. I believe the use of VHS was popularized because it was much cheaper for adult performers to use than Betamax, its primary competitor at the time. One of the first viral online purchases was the Pamela Anderson sex tape on the then-burgeoning World Wide Web. As the technology developed, performers wanted the ability to talk with their fans while camming, so they built in the chat function. Sex workers have been some of the first early adopters of cryptocurrencies, and remain on the forefront of innovation.
AJ: Documenting this history is so important, especially as AI pornography takes off and we see these new technologies that can be used without sex workers' consent, which jeopardize their labor and lifeline.
MS: Consent is everything. But AI pornography is one example of a broader trend of outsourcing of image making or correspondence. Within the OnlyFans industry, there are so many subsidiary companies that streamline chat functions for huge performers. It’s similar to AI chatbots, even though you're actually talking to a human who has been hired by the performer to help them retain their relationships with different clients. There's a huge gradation here, but this “new” technology has already been implemented and now we’re looking at a question of scale.
AJ: This research feels closely related to the questions raised in the Cyberfeminism Index, but I was wondering what drew you to this field in particular?
Mindy Seu, Portrait by Alexa Viscius
MS: To me, sex work falls under the umbrella of care work: people who assist our loved ones, babysitters, masseurs, somatic therapists. I'm interested in what physical touch does in a caring context.
AJ: This emphasis on physical touch and embodiment are especially interesting as you work often with mediums that we imagine to be very rigid and concrete. It seems like the organic ways that you're thinking about networks and digital mutation almost come into conflict with or introduce new dimensions to spreadsheets and these taxonomic forms.
MS: Spreadsheets are meant for data management, quantitative information … but all tools can be subverted and misused, and then become anything. Yes, we can absolutely use spreadsheets in their intended taxonomic way, which I definitely do, but we can also use them as a journal, for open access publishing, to choreograph fashion shows, as a pixel-based drawing tool, as anything that we want. And this really applies to all tools. I think this is one of the reasons why we often find artist residencies inside tech companies. Tech companies want to demonstrate they're doing something good for the world, but it's also an opportunity to have someone break their tool, and thereby expand its possibility.
AJ: The Cyberfeminism Index is a spreadsheet but has also taken other forms, such as the website, book, and presentation. How do these different tools bring out different dimensions of the research?
MS: I've always liked coauthoring, both textual and visual. Collectivity feels so expansive for me so I facilitate collaboration wherever possible. The Cyberfeminism Index began as a spreadsheet, a bibliography really intended for myself, but when I put it online to ask for modifications, I got a whole swell of examples, edits, international submissions... and it kind of snowballed from there. When Rhizome commissioned the website, my collaborator Angeline Meitzler and I wanted to emphasize that it was a coauthored volume. Now, when you add something, your name is recorded with your submission. So while the book acts as a snapshot of a moment, the website will continuously mutate and grow.
AJ: Oh, that's so awesome. After the book came out, you gave a lecture performance that reanimated the work and I was inspired by the way you conceptualized teaching or instruction as a form of art. How does your presentation of the Cyberfeminism Index change in front of an audience?
MS: It's hard to determine where performance starts and stops because, for example, the way I'm speaking with you now is very different than how I might speak with my friends on this very topic and very different from how I would treat it in a classroom. We're constantly code-switching. We're constantly putting on different tones and affects and styles of dress, and this is a form of performance.
When you consider the audience—whether giving a presentation to a client or having a serious conversation with a friend—you have an opportunity to reconsider the conventions of what we think we're supposed to do, and create a form that is specific to that material and demonstrates it in some way.
With traditional lectures, you often imagine a wood-paneled room and a person at a podium, some large projector, and everyone sitting in an amphitheater. All of this can be useful, but the idea of a lecture performance is to question those conventions and see if they're actually serving us and the research, and if there's a way to turn that on its head. So there are some lecture performances that are much more abstract and some that are much more didactic. But all of them try to circumvent these conditions so we can consider the information as well as the presentation of said information.
AJ: With the Cyberfeminism Index, what was that form for you?
MS: The book itself is unwieldy. It's over 600 pages and it feels like a pseudo-encyclopedia with a hypertextual trail. I wanted to illustrate this idea of surfing a book, like surfing a website, without explicitly stating that. In the performance, we have an overhead camera on top of an open book. It feels quite intimate because my hands are projected behind me, and I'm able to demonstrate how you can flip through this book and not read it in a linear way. Furthermore, most of the images in this book are stills or frames from things that are quite interactive and dynamic: websites or video art pieces or things of that nature. I worked with Tommy Martinez to create an augmented reality application that overlays the corresponding video on an image. The book itself is an interface.
The book itself is an interface.
AJ: Nonlinearity feels like a large part of what I understand your practice to be. And I was thinking about your teaching and the creation of syllabi, which obviously present information through time, as opposed to your PDF galleries which don't prescribe a way of moving through information. I was wondering how your teaching overlaps with your curation or archival work.
MS: I think this is about generosity. I typically prototype in public, which means I am constantly sharing my work and my references. I generally fall in the camp of being pro-piracy, open access, open source... Sharing is caring.
I typically prototype in public, which means I am constantly sharing my work and my references.
AJ: Piracy and duplication also are really valuable means of preventing link rot. I was wondering if there are measures that you put in place to protect against the weathering of your work over time.
MS: First we should define piracy, right? Piracy is not theft, necessarily. The hierarchy matters. So when you have a marginalized group taking something from an organization with more power and sharing it, I consider that piracy. I do not consider it piracy when a large organization is taking resources from a smaller organization, and then sharing that without any attribution or compensation.
But generally, we want to maintain our trails of influence and situational practices are important in this regard. That's not really built into how we were meant to use the World Wide Web. We surf a series of links and click as quickly as possible because that's how surf engines make money. Our reading was commodified. Even on platforms like Are.na, there aren't conventions for how you're supposed to save information. Each individual determines the best taxonomy or practices for their own channels and blocks. You can dump thousands of things in there. But part of the generosity of sharing is going out of your way to be as thorough as possible with your metadata, not only as a reminder to yourself of where you got this information, but to also cite your trails of influence for others.
But part of the generosity of sharing is going out of your way to be as thorough as possible with your metadata, not only as a reminder to yourself of where you got this information, but to also cite your trails of influence for others.
This can be quite casual. It doesn't have to be an academic citation, but it drives me crazy when I see an image called random numerals.jpeg. I want someone to put in the time to care for the things that they're saving. Cory Arcangel, the artist, wrote, “If you don't take your work seriously—and this can be something as simple as keeping track of titles, images, etc, etc—chances are, no one else will either.”
AJ: This diligence is very helpful because it also just distills information. In the past four or five-ish years, we've seen a rise in our public understanding of digital activism, and a lot of that has been anchored in the sharing of information. But many of those forms, like the infographic, feel intentionally stripped of that context and sourcing. How do you see archival or curatorial work as a part of a broader movement? Do you see any limits to archival work as activism?
MS: Capital-A Archives are often housed within institutions that restrict entry and access. Inside, objects are handled as if they're extremely precious, though oftentimes it's unclear how those materials were even acquired and then housed. Not to mention who deemed they were important enough to save for posterity.
I prefer grassroots archives, when a community comes together to determine what they think is worth saving and creates a more collective way of gathering and storing that information. The tricky thing here is Archives have methods of generational preservation built into their structure, while grassroots archives often don't have these resources.
But I don't think we should save everything forever. The act of archiving gives people an opportunity to make a choice about what to keep and to say, "this is important to me, my history, and the history of my community." As long as we maintain that narrative approach, archives can be really valuable tools.
I don't think we should save everything forever.
AJ: Nowadays saving is so easy that the act almost becomes meaningless. In the past few years, I've continuously upgraded my cloud size, yet when I scroll, I can rarely find what I am looking for. I guess this is what curators can do for us, limiting the scope and guiding us through archives with intentionality.
MS: Inundation is its own form of erasure... We need to be careful about what we're saving, how we're saving it, and how we find it again.