MINDY SEU
THE RESEARCHER
It’s easy to forget that the word “digital” originally referred to the human hand, but Mindy Seu’s digitally oriented practice makes these origins clear. The designer, curator, and educator isn’t afraid to get her metaphorical fingers slick with technological slime as she untangles the relationships between technology, embodiment, and culture. Her book Cyberfeminism Index digs deep into the material conditions of our evolving connectivity. With 700-plus entries, it foregrounds global narratives around the social role of technology, centering the activism, hacktivism, art, theory, and logs of the past 30 years in cyberspace. Building on her online index of techno-critical works, it unfurls strands of thought that Seu has began unpicking in IRL exhibitions and events, web projects for Rhizome and the Serpentine Galleries, and classes at institutions like Rutgers, UCLA, and Yale. Through highlighting counternarratives and counter-vectors, she shows us that the Internet is not merely what’s on our screen nor the wires underground and undersea, but the interwoven lives of the billions who log on at every single moment.