We warmly welcome you to the CYBERFEMINISM INDEX X SONIC CYBERFEMINISM Listening Session and Cyberfeminism Index book launch with Mindy Seu, Annie Goh, & Helen Kaplinsky on Wednesday February 15th.
Co-hosted by PUBLICS as part of its year-long program focusing on The Voice as Practice within the framework of its Open Up Program, CYBERFEMINISM INDEX X SONIC CYBERFEMINISM is the first in the new event series ‘Cyberfeminism(s) to proto-feminism’. As part of this event we will be launching the Cyberfeminism Index by Mindy Seu and immersing ourselves in Sonic Cyberfeminisms with a listening session led by Annie Goh.
The new publication Cyberfeminism Index started as an open access, crowd-sourced spreadsheet of theoretical references and artworks. It developed into a website, commissioned by Rhizome, and now a printed publication which brings together over 700 projects from 1991–2020 at the intersection of feminism, media arts and activism. The publication’s unique design places emphasis on citational reading, with cross-referencing between text excerpts and images of hacking, glitching and decolonising digital infrastructures. Less an art history and more an intertwingled goodybag, the editor, Mindy Seu will perform an AR-based demonstration of citational reading from the Index.
As a means to guide the reader, the Index features collected lists of projects, including one on ‘Sonic Cyberfeminisms’ by artist and researcher Annie Goh. The listening session during the event will combine an introduction to Goh’s ‘Sonic Cyberfeminisms’ project—a socially and culturally embedded approach to sonic knowledge production—with moments of immersive listening to her sound artworks. Goh will also present her more recent work on ‘archaeoacoustics’ where she leans on Donna Haraway’s work to explore the echo as a sonic feminist figuration. Through an auditory archeological imaginary, Goh invites us to feel the resonance of premodernity, while questioning the romanticised construction of motherhood and its relation to the sonic in given histories.
‘Cyberfeminism(s) to proto-feminism’ is a series of events, taking place at different venues throughout 2023, curated by Helen Kaplinsky. Cyberfeminism(s) have too often been understood as a future-facing, ironic stagings of technocracy. ‘Proto-feminism’ describes approaches before the modern conception of feminism that have been interpreted for feminist projects today. Here we pay attention to how artists working within the legacy of cyberfeminism draw on proto-feminist historical temporalities and mythologies. Digital self-hood is diffracted through the lenses of past-facing narratives to inform feminist struggles and imaginaries today.
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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. Mindy’s ongoing Cyberfeminism Index, which gathers three decades of online activism and net art, was commissioned by Rhizome and presented at the New Museum in its online form, and its print form is a recipient of a Graham Foundation Grant. 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. Mindy 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.
Annie Goh is an artist and researcher working primarily with sound, space, electronic media and generative processes within their social and cultural contexts. Exhibitions, performances and residencies include Mimosa House (2021, London, UK); Somerset House Studies AGM (2021, London, UK), Studio XX (2018, Montreal, Canada), Parabol, (2016, Bergen, NO), Sexing Sound (2015, Chicago, US). Publications include: Coming to Know: An Archaeology of Listening (2022), Flusser Studies (2022), Feminist Review (2021), Parallax (2017), n.paradoxa: feminist art journal (2016). She completed her PhD at Goldsmiths, University of London in 2019 on archaeoacoustics and sonic knowledge production, where she was also a Stuart Hall Foundation PhD Fellow. She co-curated the discourse program of CTM Festival Berlin 2013-2016 and is co-founder of the Sonic Cyberfeminisms project since 2015 with Dr. Marie Thompson. She has taught in BA Fine Art at Central Saint Martins, University of Arts London, at Goldsmiths University of London, University of Arts Berlin and Humboldt University Berlin. She is Lecturer & Course Leader of BA Sound Arts at LCC, University of Arts London.
Visit for more information:
→ Cyberfeminism Index
→ Mindy Seu
→ Annie Goh
→ openupeu.com