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 precisely is intercourse, and what precisely is know-how?” Seu puzzled. “Neither will be cleanly outlined.”
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. “In case you’re a lady who owns a pair of Tabis or Miistas, you’ll have this tome,” joked comic Brian Park on his tradition podcast “Middlebrow.”
Nonetheless, the knot between sexuality and know-how tugged at her. “Just lately, my follow has advanced towards technology-driven efficiency and publication,” she mentioned. “It’s not precisely conventional efficiency artwork, however I imagine that areas like lectures and readings will be made performative.” Although she wasn’t but completed exploring this theme, she wasn’t certain easy methods to method it subsequent — till an experiment by Julio Correa, a former Yale graduate pupil, sparked an thought. Correa had devised an Instagram Tales-based lecture format, and she or he instantly noticed its potential. She reached out to ask if she may “manipulate” his thought right into a efficiency piece, and would he prefer to collaborate?
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Thus, “A Sexual Historical past of the Web” was born. The work is 2 issues without delay: a participatory lecture-performance carried out by means of 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 a substitute a curated miscellany of non-sequiturs and the type 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 Extensive 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 referred to as “tech’s authentic 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 Up to date at MOCA. “However understanding the arc is useful, particularly the way it’s tied to militaristic origins rooted in energy, and the way those self same individuals had been additionally 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 pal, the artist Isabelle Albuquerque.
The ground-to-ceiling home windows excessive 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 vainness with pearl inlay. That Seu marries the female and the spartan in her area feels intentional — a mirrored image of the dualities that animate her life and work.
“A Sexual Historical past of the Web” by Mindy Seu
(Images 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 discovered 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 requested Jeeves easy methods to have an orgasm,” she writes. “I sexted with classmates on AOL Instantaneous Messenger. Any curiosities had been saved till I may sneak onto my household’s shared ice blue iMac G3 in the lounge.”
At 34, the very-online educational holds a grasp’s from Harvard’s Graduate College 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 when it’s in a nihilistic approach,” she mentioned.
On-line, followers declare their “mind crushes” on Seu, whose ultra-detailed spreadsheets have turn into unlikely catnip for TikTok. Self-importance Honest dubbed her the uncommon cybernaut who “lands soft-focus photoshoots in area of interest life-style publications.” Her uncommon energy is the flexibility to maneuver by means of completely different fields, Trojan-horsing her theories throughout academia, the artwork world, the lit scene, tech, style, et al. Sue’s notoriety continued to swell after showing on the favored web discuss present “Subway Takes” with the standout zinger: “Gossip is socially helpful, particularly to girls and the marginalized.”
“Mindy’s actually good at bridging completely different audiences who may not learn a tutorial textual content concerning the historical past of the web however are concerned about Mindy’s follow,” mentioned Correa, Seu’s student-turned-collaborator. When the 2 workshopped their efficiency final 12 months on their finsta (a.okay.a. pretend Instagram), they encountered one main hurdle: censorship. They needed to get artistic with their algospeak (like altering “intercourse” to “s*x”) to maintain from getting banned.
Mindy Seu in her MacArthur Park loft.
(Carlin Stiehl / For The Occasions)
“A Sexual Historical past of the Web,” designed by Laura Coombs, carries that collaborative ethos into its monetary construction. Seu’s first e book went by means of conventional publishing, the place authors usually obtain about 10% and contributors obtain fastened charges. This time, she needed a quotation mannequin that compensated the 46 thinkers who formed her understanding of the topic.
She approached Yancey Strickler, director of Metalabel, “an indie document label for all types of tradition,” and co-founder of Kickstarter. Seu’s authentic proposal waived all earnings to collaborators. “Everybody received paid however her,” Strickler mentioned. If she needed 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% earnings 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 will increase the mission’s worth, and a few of that worth ought to move again to you.”
Neither can identify a publishing precedent. “It reveals a profound, sensible morality that underlies her work,” he mentioned.
At MOCA, about 300 Angelenos braved an atmospheric river to take a seat 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 palms as Seu strikes by means of the room. (“I deliberately put on very noisy footwear,” she mentioned earlier.)
With the calm cadence of a flight attendant, Sue instructs everybody to place their telephones on Do Not Disturb, sound and brightness to max and open Instagram to seek out @asexualhistoryoftheinternet.
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 generally perverted — roots of our on a regular basis applied sciences. Listening to women and men say “click on and clitoris” collectively is its personal spectacle.
“From private web sites to on-line communities, cryptocurrencies to AI, the web has been constructed on the backs of unattributed intercourse staff,” one slide notes. Intercourse work has lengthy been an early adopter of rising know-how — from VHS to the web — and the current is not any exception. Two years in the past, OnlyFans creators made more cash than the full NBA wage mixed; right now, the corporate now generates extra income per worker than Apple or Nvidia.
Seu ends with the broadly identified dominatrix Mistress Harley’s idea of information domination, a subset of BDSM during which her “subs” (a.okay.a. submissives) grant her distant entry to their machines. Seu tells the gang that she has primarily performed the identical, “viewing the voyeurs” and taking photographs 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.
