A SEXUAL HISTORY OF THE INTERNET
a lecture performance by Mindy Seu
| 2025-09-20 | Pioneer Works (sold-out) | New York |
| 2025-09-26 | Us By Night Festival | Antwerp |
| 2025-10-09 | Wood Street Galleries (sold-out) | Pittsburgh |
| 2025-10-18 | Performance Space New York (sold-out) | New York |
| 2025-10-25 | KW (sold-out) | Berlin |
| 2025-10-30 | Office for Contemporary Art (sold-out) | Oslo |
| 2025-11-01 | La Mosca (sold-out) | Madrid |
| 2025-11-06 | Kunstverein | Hamburg |
| 2025-11-15 | Museum of Contemporary Art (sold-out) | Los Angeles |
| 2025-11-21 | Gray Area (tickets) | San Francisco |
| 2025-12-13 | Museum of Contemporary Art | Tokyo |
| see photos from past performances |
September 2025 premiere at Pioneer Works, photo by Max Lakner
A SEXUAL HISTORY OF THE INTERNET is a project in two parts: (1) a participatory lecture performance and (2) an artist book. It reveals the pervasive and perverted origins of our digital tools. In the performance, these histories and citations will be read aloud by you, the audience, through a shared script on your mobile device. It is a performance of re-citation.
photo by Tim Schutsky, art direction by Laura Coombs
Preorder the Book!Alongside the lecture performance, the eponymous 700+ page artist book will be published on Metalabel. The book A SEXUAL HISTORY OF THE INTERNET is a financial experiment of redistribution. In it, you’ll find citations by 45 people. When you buy this book, they will split 30% of profits through “Citational Splits” — a new model of attribution. Read more about this financial experiment.
Designer: Laura Coombs
Editor: Meg Miller
Lecture Format Collaborator: Julio Correa
Illustrator: Ven Qiu
Timecodes Scripting: Jon Gacnik
Videographer: Gabriel Noguez
3D Artist: Tom Hancocks
Website Support: Charles Broskoski
Metalabel: Yancey Strickler
Consultant: Gia Kuan
Printer: DZA
This Instagram-Stories-as-Lecture format was first conceived of by Julio Correa in Seu’s Lecture Performance studio course (Fall 2023) at Yale School of Art. Seu further developed this format, in collaboration with Correa, for A SEXUAL HISTORY OF THE INTERNET.
PRAISE
“The performance sounds like a Catholic Mass… gave me shivers.”
—Paola Antonelli, Senior Curator of Architecture and Design at the Museum of Modern Art
“Is the internet about sex or sterility? It’s a species-level decision we still have not made. But the conversation is starting with A SEXUAL HISTORY OF THE INTERNET. A must-see if you have sex organs and use the internet.”
—Jaron Lanier, pioneer of virtual reality
“This is not just a performance, it’s an excavation. Mindy Seu exposes the sexual subtext coded into our technologies and reframes the internet as a site of power, control, and longing. It’s bold, brilliant, and necessary.”
—Erika Lust, pornographic filmmaker
“Seu’s polished event achieved a certain kind of intimacy and a sense of collectivity; it also reminded us of how mediated and compromised connections facilitated by social media always are.”
—Brian Droitcour, art critic, Cultured
“What struck me in [the performance] was the radical edge of digital life.”
—Jamieson Webster, psychoanalyst, author of Disorganization and Sex
“The lecture also comes in print form, a brick of black paper roughly the size of a very thick phone screen, reproducing a facsimile of every slide. It’s a ‘little black book.’ You can use it at your own pace, and in private, and its looping lists of citations act like a hookup directory of the mind.”
—Travis Diehl, art critic, Spike Art Magazine
“The phone was an extension of the performance but moreover an extension of ourselves and our bodies. The setting made this feel novel, almost foreign.”
—Magdalene J. Taylor, writer of Many Such Cases, journalist for Playboy
“Seu builds a compelling case for the inherent erotic nature of engaging with technology and existing online.”
—Laura Pitcher, US Editor, DAZED
ABOUT THE ARTIST
Photo by Iga Drobisz
Mindy Seu (b. 1991, California) is an artist and technologist based in Los Angeles and New York City. Her practice of technology-driven performance and publication focuses on online culture and internet history. A SEXUAL HISTORY OF THE INTERNET (2025) follows her first book CYBERFEMINISM INDEX (2023), a pseudo-encyclopedia that gathers three decades of online activism and net art. Mindy is currently teaching as an Associate Professor at University of California, Los Angeles in the Department of Design Media Arts.
SELECTED PRESS
ARTnews, “Mindy Seu’s Latest Lecture, ‘A Sexual History of the Internet,’ Is a Grand Financial Experiment,” by Shanti Escalante-De Mattei
DAZED, “Is your phone a sex toy? Mindy Seu says yes,” by Laura Pitcher
Spike Art Magazine, “iPhone Modernism,” by Travis Diehl
Cultured, “A Psychoanalyst and an Internet Theorist Get Real About the Ritual Humiliation of Life Online,” conversation with Jamieson Webster
Many Such Cases, “You’re Already a Sexual Cyborg,” by Magdalene J. Taylor
Mozilla Foundation, “Welcome to the Post-Naive Internet Era,” by Severin Matusek, Nick Houde and Paloma Moniz
Cultured, “Seeing Through the Slop: Brian Droitcour’s Guide to Digital Art That Slaps. Our critic finds inspiration in new work engaging with A.I., gaming, and social media by Porpentine, Sarah Friend, and Mindy Seu,” by Brian Droitcour