Saturday, June 17, 2023
7:30pm doors / 8:00pm show
Tickets $15 (discounted or free for members)
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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. Edited by designer, professor, and researcher Mindy Seu, CYBERFEMINISM INDEX (Inventory Press) is a collection of over 700 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.
Alongside an overview of the index and an AR reading, Seu will be joined by technologists Chia Amisola, Viv Qiu, and Molly Turner to discuss the release of CYBERFEMINISM INDEX. The conversation will be accompanied by a performance from sound artist Evicshen (Victoria Shen).
CYBERFEMINISM INDEX—an anti-canon, of sorts—celebrates and makes visible cyberfeminism’s long-ignored origins and its expansive legacy.
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, sharing—typically in the form of lists and spreadsheets—and close collaborations. Her latest writing surveys historical precursors of the metaverse and reveals the materiality of the internet. She has lectured internationally at cultural institutions (Barbican Centre, New Museum), academic institutions (Columbia University, Central Saint Martins), and mainstream platforms (Pornhub, SSENSE, Google), among many others, and has been a resident at MacDowell, Sitterwerk Foundation, Pioneer Works, and Internet Archive. Seu 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.
Chia Amisola is an internet/ambient artist from Manila, Philippines. Their (web)site-specific art is an act of worldmaking, constructing spaces, systems, and tools that posit worlds where creation is synonymous with liberation. Ambience is political: their environments tackle the visibilities infrastructure, poetics, labor, and maintenance. Amisola is the founder of Developh, a critical technology institute in the Philippines founded in 2016, and now stewards the Philippine Internet Archive.
Viv Qiu is a designer based in the Bay Area, co-parented by Chinese immigrants and the internet. With a foundation in design, research, curation, writing, and creative direction, they are honing concept as their core medium. Qiu is a zealot for the experimental, the speculative, and the absurd. They dedicate their practice to projects that combat hegemony through accessibility, advocacy, community, and storytelling. Currently, they split their time between freelance consulting work, training as a death doula, and running Output Field (a 501(c)3 nonprofit dedicated to redistributing clout in the arts).
Gamer theory and self-performance online are ongoing focus points in Molly Turner's work, in which she battles phone dependency through drawing, print making, and garment design alongside the Realcore event/radio series. Informed by her day job as a surface designer, her projects center around tactile responses to our relationship with technology and its subsequent impact on the body.
Victoria Shen is a sound artist, experimental music performer, and instrument maker based in San Francisco. Her sound practice is concerned with the spatiality/physicality of sound and its relationship to the human body. Her music features analog modular synthesizers, vinyl/resin records, and self-built electronics. In her live performances, she proposes an exploration between meaning and non-meaning through the physical activation of noise tropes. Her probing into these melodic voids interrogates the ways we perceive value within aural experiences. The appendage-like instruments and objects she makes exemplify Shen’s ability to embody through sound her interest in the tension created by opposition: control and chaos, the unique and the mass produced, the practical and the absurd.