Lavine Lecture: CYBERFEMINISM INDEX Performative Book Reading and Discussion

MIT List Visual Arts Center will host the book launch for designer and editor Mindy Seu’s CYBERFEMINISM INDEX. The event will feature a performative reading by Seu and conversation with Kendra Albert. 

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.  

In partnership with Cambridge Science Festival and MIT Press Bookstore

This will be a hybrid event with a live video that can be live-streamed here at 6:00 PM. The link will also be emailed to you.

Speaker Bios:

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.

Kendra Albert is a public interest technology lawyer with a special interest in computer security law and freedom of expression. They serve as a clinical instructor at the Cyberlaw Clinic at Harvard Law School, where they teach students to practice law by working with pro bono clients. Kendra is also the founder and director of the Initiative for a Representative First Amendment.

They serve on the board of the ACLU of Massachusetts and the Tor Project, and provide support as a legal advisor for Hacking // Hustling. In their free time, Kendra enjoys giving away other people’s money, playing video games, and making people in power uncomfortable.

About the Lavine Lecture Series

The Leroy and Dorothy Lavine Lecture Series was established to honor the Lavines, two prominent Boston art patrons and longtime supporters of the MIT List Visual Arts Center. The Leroy and Dorothy Lavine Lectures bring to the Boston community distinguished art world figures for talks on modern and contemporary art.