Joburg Launch: Cyberfeminism Index
With Mindy Seu & Natalie Paneng
- - -
Venue: LAPA, Brixton (Breezeblock Cafe) / Watch the video here
Join us at pan-african project space LAPA for the Joburg launch of the Cyberfeminism Index, with a performative reading by Mindy Seu, as well as a special installation and performative presentation by multidisciplinary artist Natalie Paneng.
In Cyberfeminism Index, hackers, scholars, artists, and activists of all regions, races and sexual orientations consider how humans might reconstruct themselves by way of technology. When learning about internet history, we are taught to focus on engineering, the military-industrial complex, and the grandfathers who created the architecture and protocol. But 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, it includes more than 700 short 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. Both a vital introduction for laypeople and a robust resource guide for educators, Cyberfeminism Index—an anti-canon, of sorts—celebrates the multiplicity of practices that fall under this imperfect categorization 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, and close collaborations. 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. 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.
Natalie Paneng received her BA in Dramatic Arts from the University of Witwatersrand in 2018 and was awarded the Leon Gluckman Prize for the best piece of creative work. She lives and works in Johannesburg, South Africa. Natalie makes use of both her self-taught digital skills and theatre background to create multidisciplinary digital art/new media. Paneng’s work has been exhibited with TMRW Gallery, The National Arts Festival, Blank Projects, Michaelis School of Fine Art, BKHz Gallery, Javett Art UP and Galerie Eigen Art Leipzig and Mutek Festival. She has also published creative research through Ellipses Journal and Artist Research Africa and was a 2020 Fellow with the Institute of Creative Arts at the University of Cape Town. Paneng describes herself as a world-builder and sees her growing practice as a way to navigate, share and archive imagined and alternative realities brought to life through digital artistic process.