mindy seu performs a sexual history of the internet in milan

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.

Teletext Babez, emulation by Dragan Espenschied; photo by Tim Schutsky, art direction by Laura Coombs

http://asciiporn.us/; photo by Tim Schutsky, art direction by Laura Coombs

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.

still of Mistress Harley from Engadget, “Hacking, castration and the future of financial domination,” 2018; photo by Tim Schutsky, art direction by Laura Coombs