Sex, citations, and internet history retold – Mindy Seu

Our digital tools are steeped in pleasure. From mobile phones flooding our senses with stimuli to the yonic 1 nature of the computer mouse (with its clitoral scrolling wheel), to the rise of 'Big Porn', the industry of arousal has played a key part in the development of objects and interfaces through which we access the internet.

Who better than "the internet's sexual historian" Mindy Seu to explain how this all came about and to explore where it's going?

The LA-based artist, technologist and professor joined us ahead of her August performance lecture of A Sexual History of the Internet at State Library Victoria for Now or Never 2. In conversation with Ana Tiquia, Mindy discussed how internet history can be retold through human sexuality and the collective act of gathering histories and stories without resorting to extraction. Here, phones become performance tools, libraries are cathedrals of communal reading, and the future of a liberated internet may depend on many small acts of change.

Transcript

0:00:02 - 0:01:10
Ana Tiquia
What can queer and feminist readings of the history of the internet tell us about how desire, sexuality, and the erotic have shaped internet infrastructure and some of our most ubiquitous everyday technologies? We're often told a masculinist history of the internet through its machines and pioneers, a story of military research and social change. But what happens when we begin gathering the voices and overlooked contributions that sit beyond the official record, and what might happen when we voice these histories collectively?In this episode, Mindy Seu invites us to see the internet as a site of intimacy, a densely storied and lively network of people, bodies and ideas, rather than the product of lone creator geniuses.I'm Ana Tiquia, Head of Innovation & Research at State Library Victoria. And you're listening to an SLV Lab podcast, part of our conversation series exploring emerging technology, digital experimentation and library futures with artists, technologists and workers in the cultural sector.0:01:11 - 0:01:43
Mindy Seu
A lot of these works, my works especially being very technology facing... I'm not trying to offer a moral about technology. I think it's too easy to say something is evil or good. There's like this blurriness in between, and it's trying to kind of give light to the absurdist experiences that have only been able to emerge since the development of online life, and also the very tender and intimate and human experiences that have emerged as well, and trying to position those next to each other.0:01:43 - 0:03:54
Ana Tiquia
Mindy Seu is an artist, technologist and academic based in Los Angeles and New York City, and an associate professor in UCLA's Department of Design, Media Arts. Her work spans books, websites, performance teaching, and collective research. Her first book, Cyberfeminism Index in 2023, brought together three decades of online activism and net art in the form of a collaborative, evolving archive.Mindy's latest project, A Sexual History of the Internet extends this gathering practice through an artist book and participatory performance lecture. In August this year, she'll stage this work in Melbourne as part of the Now or Never Festival at State Library Victoria. In this conversation, we speak about the convergence of sexuality and technology and how it gave rise to the devices in interfaces we interact with every day.We explore citation as both a creative method and a feminist practice of recognising people whose contributions have been overlooked. And finally, she considers how we can respond to an uncertain future through consciousness raising and small yet significant acts of community care. The following conversation was recorded on the unceded lands of the Wurundjeri Wor-Wurrung people of the Kulin nation.We acknowledge the traditional lands of all Victorian Aboriginal clans and their cultural practices and knowledge systems. We'd also like to acknowledge and pay our respects to any First Nations listeners joining us for this conversation.Thank you so much for joining us for the SLV Lab Podcast, and thank you so much for joining us early in your morning from Berlin. Really appreciate the opportunity to talk to you before your presentation of A Sexual History of the Internet at State Library Victoria, as a part of the Now or Ever festival in August. I often start by speaking to our interviewees about their practices, and the LA Times called you “the internet sexual historian”, and I was wondering if you could talk a bit about your practices as an artist or, and technologist or researcher.How do you describe exactly what it is that you do?0:03:54 - 0:04:49
Mindy Seu
Yeah, that was a very generous quote by the LA Times. I describe myself as an artist. I'm a professor at UCLA, but I like using this prefix “A” rather than “The”, because it kind of suggests that there's room and space for a lot of other people. A lot of my works Cyberfeminism Index or A Sexual History of the Internet are all about citations and creating a polyvocal, multiplicitous history.So A Sexual History of the Internet brings together 46 different citations of artists, activists, scholars – many I'm sure, we’ll mention in today's conversation – that in many ways also could embrace this title. So all to say, this is all part of a network and try to not attribute it to a singular person.0:04:49 - 0:05:05
Ana Tiquia
I wanted to ask you if you could tell us just more about A Sexual History of the Internet and what you're doing with this research, what this story of telling, you know, histories of the internet through desire lines and the evolution of sexuality in terms of the evolution of technology.0:05:05 - 0:11:18
Mindy Seu
So A Sexual History of the Internet is a lecture performance that takes place on your phone on Instagram. It's also then replicated as a performance script facsimile that people can buy as an artist book. And that artist book is also a financial experiment. So the script that you would see during the performance is told in a series of chapters.The first chapter tries to unpack, or if anything, asks the audience to question what exactly is sex and what exactly is technology? If you are part of a queer community or a part of a querying practice at all, people kind of understand from the start because they're the people they love or have sex with or are aroused by, doesn't fit into the standard heterosexual definition.They've already been prompted to question what does sex look like? What could a relationship look like? All of these things. Similarly, with technology, it might have a very digital connotation. But when you think about the ancestral technologies that we've used, when we think about all of the other social constructs that have been used to help people in society, which is a definition of technology, it also becomes quite expansive.So we bring those two things together, and the first chapter starts by asking or provoking the audience by saying your phone is a sex toy. So again, sex toys might have a specific connotation, but what is that except a device that creates arousal between multiple people or between the device and a human body? Let's say – as many bodies are needed. Then this quote our phone as a sex toy was told to me at a bar by my artist friend Melanie Hoff, and you can begin to then question what that means.It has some of the traits of a standard sex toy. It vibrates. Mine currently has a plastic silicon sleeve on it. It's a haptic device. It also can be used as all these other ways that people are naturally aroused through textual correspondence, through visual stimuli. It's used to connect different people. It's used to connect you to something outside of yourself.So all of these create an environment of play, of sexual arousal and desire. This also then triggers into or pivots into a history of the computer mouse, which was a precursor of the phone that we use. So Ali Na, the historian, talks about this in the fetish of the click. But it starts with the the light gun, which was a device that was used to simulate warfare in its researchers and various soldiers.This was also the origin of the head mounted display or the VR headset. This then segue-wayed into the light pen, which is a very different... if you imagine yourself holding a stylus, right now, it's a very different sensation than holding a computer mouse. That also means you interact with the screen differently. It feels like a laser pointer rather than something that actually you can cup in the palm of your hand.So then when this led to the computer mouse, Ali Na suggests that this was the first instance where it moved from a phallic device towards a more yonic one. You can cradle it in your hand. It had two buttons on either side with the scrolling wheel in the center. The Australian art collective VNS Matrix who coined Cyberfeminism, actually has this quote “the clitoris is the direct line to the matrix”, and maybe this could be seen as an analogy for thatscrolling computer mouse wheel allows you to enter a computer matrix or an online space. And of course now we use trackpads, phones, etc. and even if they’re may be a bit more sterile, they’re effectively more haptic, they’re pressure sensitive, they vibrate, they heat up, all of these other sensorial impacts. So then this goes into a chapter about taking the classic internet history that we know, focusing on these male engineers or developers, and then talking about how some of their decisions were quite sex forward.So, for example, this group of researchers at USC, when they were creating a compression algorithm, they used the photo of a Playboy model, Lena Schlubaum, also known as Lena Forsen. And this image was analysed billions of times. And she became known as the mother of the JPEG retroactively. But at the time, it's really seen as a very notable example of extraction and erasure because she wasn't given any credit or financial compensation.Another chapter follows and focuses on the unspoken histories of the internet. So thinking about all of the sex workers that pioneered the rise of e-com, the rise in bandwidth, the rise of big porn, which was essentially a tech company, not an arousal company. In this chapter, we hear from historians like Melissa Gira Grant, all technologists like Liara Roux, anthropologists Ezra Padgett or the sex worker and CEO Ali Knox, to really understand how did sex workers push forward the development of this techno landscape, and why did they get no credit for it?And part of this book is trying to then bring together a lot of different types of citations to show that a lot of these social or oral histories, social citations or oral histories, are as legitimate as the academic citations in prints that we might refer to, and all of these have to come together to create an alternative history, to try to be as polyvocal as possible.0:11:18 - 0:11:40
Ana Tiquia
So this is the second in your series of works which take the form of being both a book as well as a performance lecture. Your previous work included the Cyberfeminism Index, which followed a similar form. I was curious about your choice of medium to share the research, and why you've chosen to open up both print publication into these more expanded live performances.0:11:41 - 0:12:48
Mindy Seu
In many ways, both of these are umbrella projects. The Cyberfeminism Index is a book. It's a website. It is a performance. It feels like a community. A Sexual History of the Internet is also an artist book, but it's also a script that lives online, on Instagram. It's a performance, it's a financial experiment. So all of these have different outputs that I think for me, have been really important as a very hybrid researcher and artist thinking about the same topic, but as it manifests through different media, different groups of people and how it can be activated, I like thinking about this as gathering.We are all naturally finding little treasures and bringing them to our homes, going back to our histories as hunter gatherers, perhaps, but in this case, really thinking about material gathering. So bringing together all these disparate references, citations, etc., but also that activating it through a social gathering, whether it's a performance, a group conversation, a workshop, something like this.0:12:48 - 0:12:58
Ana Tiquia
I was really fascinated about the financial model that you also develop alongside this work and, and how that relates to sort of citation and giving voice as well.0:12:58 - 0:14:21
Mindy Seu
Yeah. So because the lecture performance is one way that people will access the performance, it takes place on Instagram while we are prototyping it, Instagram kept removing some of our accounts or references because of their community guidelines or censorship rules. So I worked with Laura Combs, my very good friend and design partner, and we decided to print a book to act as a facsimile of the performance script and because of an archival impulse.So that book, it also becomes a salable object. So for every book sold, profit is redistributed to the people cited within the book. And it's trying to become a new model of redistribution. We already have so many difficulties giving proper citation to quotes. Think about like how easy it is to screenshot and repost something online without crediting the person.But this is trying to create a textual trail of a citation and also give credit through a financial token. So they'll split 30% of profits. And if we sell out – we're very close to selling out – they'll make between around 800 USD. And I think it's a nice model that's easy to replicate and shows how even like a small artist project like this can act as a form of redistribution.0:14:21 - 0:14:34
Ana Tiquia
Such an incredible combination of both the form and the impact of this work. I was wondering if you could share a little bit about what audiences can expect when encountering A Sexual History of the Internet in person?0:14:34 - 0:16:25
Mindy Seu
Yeah, so at the the library, it might be kind of a different format because of the star shaped pattern, but the space is incredibly grand, and I'm very excited to hear the soundscape in such an acoustic space. But imagine entering a room. It's very dark. Everyone takes a seat and you're then prompted to pull out your phone. Everyone goes to the same Instagram account, opens the same Instagram highlight, and from there it auto plays for 45 minutes.During this time, your phone light is of course transmitting light onto your face, which acts like as a spotlight for each audience member. Each phone is also transmitting sound, and there's also a bit of latency because it's impossible to sync everyone up completely. So because of this, it kind of becomes a bit of an asynchronous choral landscape. People have described it feeling like a Catholic mass, and it also then is a polyvocal reading.So people are assigned citations and you're then prompted to read that aloud And with my editor, Meg Miller, we realised that the root of citation is the same as the root of recital. So that means that even in this experiment of citation, we're also then asking the audience member to recite it aloud to say someone's words aloud to embody it.And that feels... it felt like a very beautiful coincidence, considering a lot of these people have never been cited. So then to be able to embody their words felt like a different level of incantation.0:16:25 - 0:16:48
Ana Tiquia
I'm just thinking about the space that you'll be performing this in. So you've been touring a sexual history of the internet globally, widely. There's been several performances in all parts of the world, and on the 25th of August, you'll be performing it in our very iconic domed La Trobe Reading Room at State Library Victoria. Have you visited the space before or are you familiar with it?0:16:48 - 0:17:20
Mindy Seu
I haven't visited personally, but I've been seeing photos and it's stunning, so I'm very excited to do this performance there because I initially asked the team, they're like, what is your dream location? And I'm like, maybe a church because of this, like choral quality that naturally ensues. And they came back with this location and it in some ways has a very church like aura because it's this domed ceiling, the stained glass, the multiple levels.So I think doing in this space will feel rather natural.0:17:20 - 0:18:14
Ana Tiquia
I think it's it feels like a really apt location to stage your work. I'm just loving the fact as well that you've that you've got this work which is really around reading and voicing and polyvocality and, you know, this is a space which is actually normally a silent reading room. So it's a space where people are conducting research, they're writing, they're developing creative works often from this space, but they're doing it collectively, but they're often doing it in silence and something beautiful about itperhaps also being a temple to research in a way. You know, the library itself is predominantly a research library as well as a reference library, but not a lending library. It's a state library. So there's something fascinating about situating your research and and possibly reading in that way. How do you sort of situate the act of reading in this work?Obviously, you're giving voice to voices that often haven't been heard.0:18:14 - 0:19:24
Mindy Seu
Yeah, I mean, the I think the merge is really beautiful. As a professor in a research university, I use a lot of academic citations. I believe in its value, like peer review is the lifeline of academia. I also truly believe in libraries, non-circulating or otherwise. And on the flip side of this, I also believe in the grassroots archive, the DIY library, the social citation, the oral history.Like, I think you kind of need this entire spectrum of citations and ways of accessing those to honor the very polyvocal histories that we've all lived through. So even in this performance, we give the same weight of an academic citation to a social citation, like a quote whispered to me at a bar, or other oral histories that have not been documented in a peer reviewed journal.Things like social citations like you might find on Instagram. Like all of these things come together to create this very layered tapestry of citations.0:19:25 - 0:19:38
Ana Tiquia
What are the responses that you've had from audiences and experiencing the work because it's highly participatory. Is there a different quality, you'd say, to reading the book or your publication, as opposed to participating in it on mass?0:19:38 - 0:21:10
Mindy Seu
Yeah, the book is interesting to me because the your phone and the book have different affordances. The phone is dynamic media. It will move on its own. It's flashing lights and colors and sounds. The book we intentionally made very, very quiet. It is the size of an iPhone, but it's extruded to the number of slides in the performance, which is roughly 600 or so.And we wanted it to feel like a little black book. So it's clad in this faux leather, and that combination makes it feel like a little Bible. And because of the economics of printing and wanting to make this book as accessible as possible, we printed it with black paper and silver ink, so there's no color. If anything, in order to see it, you kind of have to move around the pages because it sparkles.But that said, the color is the form of incantation that is the color coding so people know what to read. So without the color, it actually transforms the book into a very solitary device. Whereas the iPhone is meant to be like this choral group script.0:21:10 - 0:21:42
Ana Tiquia
This is clearly a work that's been so considered and thought through and worked in so many different ways. You know, everything from the way that you've conducted your research, the use of citations, the performance lectures, and then this financial distribution model. I was wanting to ask you, what really has drawn you to telling these particular types of internet histories, often histories that are really masculine in this particular way, which I guess has particularly queer and feminist readings, but also gives rise to often unheard voices.0:21:42 - 0:23:29
Mindy Seu
I mean, if you consider history at large, it's a very masculinist history. And I think that I know that even if those are the primary histories that have been legitimised alongside them, there have been incredible other histories that really speak to the mass of people, the individual stories that have led to these larger historical punctuations, which tend to focus on a singular hero.I really love referring to the carrier bag theory of fiction, which is an essay by Ursula K. Le Guin, the science fiction author, and in it she describes the first tool as the basket rather than the spear. So I love this because it transforms our idea of tools away from the digital and towards the ancestral, but it also changes our idea of the hero away from a he and towards a we.Right? This is about a collective history of gathering, of bringing things home, of sharing them. And this feels like a very natural creative process for myself and for most of my peers. People, often feminist scholars, will often say that the greatest feminist technology is the citation, and just truly understanding that no idea or concept comes to life by itself.It emerges through a network of experiences and people and references. And why not give credit to those things? It just makes this network feel so much richer.0:23:29 - 0:23:36
Ana Tiquia
So this has really been a carrier bag approach to telling these histories, and you talked a lot about collecting. That's part of your process?0:23:37 - 0:25:17
Mindy Seu
Well, for Cyberfem[inism Index], for this, for a lot of the projects that I was doing before that were more quietly received, I feel like even as an artist, part of becoming an artist is understanding what your methodology is. And I was always so... I was always questioning this because I had peers who would see a blank canvas, a blank screen, and images and texts would just pour out of them.And this was just not my way. I found so inspired by moving through the world and like collecting these snippets or quotes or images or things from all sorts of media, from friends, from lectures, from artworks that I had seen, from movie clips, etc. and I found that this gathering process created such rich fodder for me to, like, make sense of things and create this tapestry.And in some ways I actually feel like that this reconfiguration is a form of authoring. Think about a collage, or think about all of these different references that people create. In art direction meetings, you go in and all you see is like a mood board of other people's images. So I think it's just trying to give light to this thingand also just it was a reassuring revelation for myself. Like, I don't have to invent something on my own. Part of my job as an artist is to like, be in the world and support my community. And that will naturally yield new or transformed works.0:25:17 - 0:25:24
Ana Tiquia
I was wondering if there's anything else that you're currently working on or currently collecting that you might be able to share?0:25:24 - 0:26:37
Mindy Seu
Yes, we're in the very early stages actually. But I have a writing partner, Max Saltarelli.. He and I were actually childhood neighbors, and we used to write plays together in high school for like high school productions. But we've reconnected and we're actually working on an experimental play about the internet. I think that's all I can say. And it will come out in New York sometime next fall.But at this time I can't release the organisation or the title, but it will also feel very polyvocal, and I think it's important to say that it doesn't... a lot of these works, my works especially being very technology facing. I'm not trying to offer a moral about technology. I think it's too easy to say something is evil or good, right?There's like this blurriness in between, and it's trying to kind of give light to the absurdist experiences that have only been able to emerge since the development of online life, and also the very tender and intimate and human experiences that have emerged as well, and trying to position those next to each other.0:26:37 - 0:27:27
Ana Tiquia
Yeah, I love the examples that you gave earlier about some of the histories and stories that you tell through your work and research, just also how it lends itself to that really that very tactile and sensuous as well as sexualised, but also very kind of human stories of how our technology around the internets has developed. I'm so excited to hear more about your play as it develops.This is just going back to something you mentioned earlier. I was just curious to also ask you, before we finished up, about your choice of using Instagram as a platform for presenting part of the work. And yeah, whether it was really a deliberate tension to use a platform that engages in so much censorship of the body, censorship of representations of the body or of sexual expression to host this work.0:27:27 - 0:29:33
Mindy Seu
Yeah, absolutely. With Cyberfeminism Index, I knew I wanted to create a bespoke tool. So I worked with Tommy Martinez and we made our own bespoke augmented reality device for the performances. For this performance, I knew I wanted to make a ubiquitous tool, because part of this process is trying to get people to examine these very classical histories and devices that we constantly use and reframe them.So when I was teaching at Yale School of Art, one of my grad students, Julio Correia, experimented with using Instagram Stories as like a as a book, as a publishing platform. And after a couple of weeks, he set this aside. But when I was developing this, years later, that experiment came to mind. So I was like, Julio, do you want to join this project?And we can kind of manipulate this form and expand upon it. So he came on as a coeditor and a sound engineer, and it was really helpful to, like, conceive of this lecture format that asks you to question what exactly is Instagram? Is it a sex toy sex device? How does it create arousal? How does it create censorship?What are ways of skirting this to make something human readable but not machine readable? What are ways of examining why some people, their sexuality is platformed and championed on Instagram, and for other people it's completely erased and black boxed. I think it was a way to get people to examine something that we use for hours every day, and to suggest an alternative use also, because, like everyone else, my primary tendency on Instagram is to doom scroll.But in this performance, you have to just let each story autoplay for 45 minutes, and it actually feels like a very slow way of using this device. So it's trying to kind of question that behavior as well.0:29:33 - 0:29:48
Ana Tiquia
I just wanted to finish up our chat by asking you, in terms of your study and research on various histories of the internet, what sort of sense do you get about what futures or potential futures of the internet might emerge from reflection on its past?0:29:48 - 0:31:42
Mindy Seu
Yeah, I get this question a lot. I think that we are in a moment of extreme anxiety, right? It's at this point quite understood by most laypeople that what we're experiencing online isn't great. Even my mother would say this, and she is like, would probably be a very clear example of a luddite or something, someone who's not very tech forward.But even now she knows these terms like algorithm. Right? It's very unusual. She uses LLMs to draft her emails. But again, I've always believed it's never a singular answer. And maybe that's what people are waiting for right now and has caused a lot of... that anxiety has caused a reduction in action because we don't know what to do.It feels very paralysing. But to cite a different science fiction author, Octavia Butler, there's never a singular answer. It's all of these people doing these gestures, small to large, that come together to create a collective movement or transformation. There's a thousand answers that come together. Some people have the bandwidth to lobby parliament and change legislation for online auction.Some people only have the ability to make a local change for their their physical community. Some people only have the ability to focus on protecting themselves. And all of these things I do think builds together against this thing, it always starts with a consciousness raising, and that is definitely here. The consciousness understands that we're in a dystopic environment, and now people are slowly trying to figure out ways of alternating this without relying on some magical app that's going to fix everything, some magical company that's going to fix everything because it won't.