mindy seu explores the web’s ties to the body and intimacy through group incantations

a lecture performance at section80 bar

At Section80 Bar in Milan, artist and technologist Mindy Seu brings her lecture performance, A SEXUAL HISTORY OF THE INTERNET, to the intimate bar-bookstore. With the shutters closed, a haze of red light covers the room in an appropriately sultry glow. ‘I do think that people seeking out sex online has been part of it from day one, and it’s been built into the infrastructure,’ she says of the way these two topics have informed each other.

What follows is what many have called a kind of religious, mass-like series of incantations, led by Seu herself, while the audience follows along on a sequence of Instagram stories that recounts the internet’s entanglement with sex. In conversation with designboom, Seu discusses how the performance confronts the ideas of consent, control, and self-definition against the backdrop of an internet whose development is inextricable from sex, desire, and power.

mindy seu in conversation with designboom

Having brought the performance across Europe, the States, and Asia, Seu reflects on how different cultures participate in the group reading. She mentions how in Antwerp and Tokyo, there was a timidness in the air. In New York, she was met with a more raucous crowd. ‘When there’s less people in the room, people naturally follow social cues more. The performance takes place entirely on Instagram, and everyone is reading these participatory quotes. When you can hear everyone else in the room, you naturally try to sync up with people. But if you’re in a room with 400 people, it’s almost too overwhelming, and you stick to your own script. I think I’m curious to see if this flocking quality happens here [in Milan].’

‘It also feels like a reflection of the infrastructure.’ She elaborates on how invisible forces like internet connection in a city can trickle into the performance: ‘Even today, I got an alert on my phone that said I had no more data, so I’m going to be using the Wi-Fi. But, for example, Berlin notoriously has bad Wi-Fi, so there you could see that the latency between phones syncing up changes dramatically.’

an evolution of the cyberfemenism index

This lecture performance series is the second for Seu. She previously went on the road with her lime green compendium, the Cyberfeminism Index. ‘For this performance, I really wanted to use a ubiquitous tool so we can intuitively understand how we’ve been trained to use it and how that could be retrained,’ she remarks on how her primary tool of presentation has changed from the Cyberfeminism Index’s use of a bespoke augmented reality system. ‘On Instagram, we do scroll, we click. Everything is very, very fast. But if you look at the interface, Instagram is very slow. Text slides last up to five seconds, video slides up to one minute. If you just let that autoplay, it actually starts to feel like an endurance test.’

Seu pulls up her own phone, which she will use to lead the event, and her screen appears in grayscale. She reveals, ‘After these [performances] are done, I delete Instagram off my phone. It’s just too easy to get into doomscrolling, so I just put up my own guardrails.’

working with and against instagram’s interface

When asked about how she combats Instagram’s distraction-filled interface during A SEXUAL HISTORY OF THE INTERNET, she walks through the way she organizes the audience to combat it. ‘At the beginning of the performance, I sync everyone up: your notifications are off, your ‘Do Not Disturb’ is on, your sound is up. Not only do you have these blocks on your phone, you also have a lot of social pressure because everyone around you is looking at the same thing. But it’s also participatory, so you kind of have to be on your toes to know when it’s your turn to participate or click.’

‘It almost feels like a party because there’s a syncopation that happens where it becomes very energetic.’ Led by a series of texts that both Seu and the audience take turns reading aloud, the history she puts forth comes out from dozens of glowing screens and into the dark room the crowd shares. ‘I don’t know quite how to describe it, and maybe it will happen here [in Milan], but it starts to feel like you just went through a religious experience because it feels like church, with the soundscape and the reading out loud and the recitation…

cite, recital, and citation 

We realized the roots of recital and citation are the same: cite. That recitals are an embodiment of the citation. You’re reading someone else’s words aloud. That felt like a nice extension of the Cyberfeminism Index because all of these essays are built off citations. But actually being able to read someone else’s words aloud led to that religious quality.’

Leveraging Instagram was an idea she developed alongside a former student of hers, Julio Correa, who had initially proposed the idea during a course she taught at Yale back in 2023. ‘I really believe in prototyping in public. We’ve been beta testing it between 2024 and 2025 to figure out the narrative arc: what could be too long or too short, how to figure out these primary beats, and the soundscape. But it was also trying to learn how to divert Instagram’s very opaque community guidelines because much of our content gets censored.’ Seu explains that they used fake Instagram accounts, temporary posts, and other methods to test what Meta deemed explicit.

crystalized in the little black book

‘Now, with this current version, we’ve learned how to censor the images and the text in a way that doesn’t really trigger these algorithms anymore.’ But even then, Seu, who was previously a fellow at the Internet Archive, emphasizes how duplication is key to keeping something digital alive. As such, A SEXUAL HISTORY OF THE INTERNET is replicated on multiple digital accounts, while the knowledge is crystallized IRL in the ‘little black book’ of the same title.

Following the performance, an even bigger audience pack into the bar to catch her talk with organizer Elisa Carassai. Once it wraps, a crowd flocks to grab a copy of the compact artifact, which was described by the artist as an Instagram story extruded to 700 pages. After experiencing how fleeting a digital story can be, they don’t want to let this history slip into the digital void.

project info:

artist: Mindy Seu | @mindyseu

event: A SEXUAL HISTORY OF THE INTERNET | @asexualhistoryoftheinternet

location: Section80 Bar, Milan, Italy | @section80.bar

date: September 20, 2025 – Fall/Winter 2026

organizer: Elisa Carassai | @elisacarassai

book: A SEXUAL HISTORY OF THE INTERNET

book designer: Laura Coombs | @lauracoombs

editor: Meg Miller

lecture format collaborator: Julio Correa | @juliocorreaestrada

illustrator: Ven Qiu

timecode scripting: Jon Gacnik

videographer: Gabriel Noguez

3D artist: Tom Hancocks

website support: Charles Broskoski

metalabel: Yancey Strickler, Lena Imamura