Teledildonic Index

Walden Green previews the new lecture performance piece by cyberfeminist scholar Mindy Seu.

“This will be an exercise in restraint.”

The chairs, it seemed, were set up to create consciously discomfiting configurations—clusters of threes and fives, mostly. A winding path spiraled through the seating, which took up most of the space in the main gallery room. Still, the function was packed enough that people had to sit on the floor, by the drinks table, or crowd the small amount of standing room left in the back. At one point, Moses Sumney showed up. 

We were gathered on the third floor of 442 Broadway in SoHo to preview “A Sexual History of the Internet,” a lecture performance piece by Mindy Seu, the artist and researcher best known for compiling the Cyberfeminism Index. Generative artist Maya Man was hosting, in the space she’d recently occupied and christened Heart Gallery. 

On the walls, another exhibition: 26 uncropped, unedited screenshots from the phones of 26 artists, blown up and printed out on posterboard. I’m still thinking about the list of an ex-boyfriend’s email sign-offs, the suit of armor using a laptop, and the series of selfies of an open mouth that will be familiar to any hypochondriac. The collection, entitled Sacred Screenshots, will be up through the end of August.

While getting mildly tipsy off my fizzy mango soju canned cocktail, I spotted Mindy and Maya across the room, planning a route through the maze of chairs. I’d claimed a seat near what I assumed was “the front,” for easy visibility purposes, but it turned out that wouldn’t be necessary.

Mindy began her lecture by turning off all the lights in the room. Weird. Then she asked us to take out our phones. Weirder. We were guided to an Instagram page—I won’t link it here, so as not to spoil all of the surprises—where a series of stories awaited us, labeled “INTRO” through “CH. 5.” In a gesture not dissimilar to a guided meditation, Mindy counted down from five, and instructed us to click on the first story when she said “click.”

The first words flashed on all of our screens at ~almost~ the exact same time:

Mindy developed “A Sexual History of the Internet” in a lecture performance studio course at the Yale School of Art. She was inspired by the work of Julio Correa, who she credits for his experimentation with the Instagram Stories-as-Lectures format. Everyone in the room was assigned one of five colors based on our birthdays (I was Magenta), and we were supposed to read aloud whatever text appeared in our hue. 

“Reading aloud may be uncomfortable,” team Red started, and team Green continued the thought, “...but others also have my color.” Every time this happened, or whenever audio played from our phones, the room was consumed by an echo effect. Here, we felt our own imperfection in the system; no matter how precisely Mindy counted down, everyone’s reaction times were slightly different. Some people were ahead of the curve, and some people were behind. The human brain is not quantized.

As she wandered throughout the crowd, Mindy’s tone throughout was cool and decisive, never detached. “You are holding a teledildonic,” she told us, exploring the concept of phone as sex toy, where “swiping accesses desire” by sexting, sending nudes, or the tactile experience of swiping itself. “It’s pressure sensitive. It vibrates,” she continued, and the whole room started to buzz. It was at this moment that, I believe, the conceit of the lecture—and the power of its format—dawned on everyone; a few nervous giggles escaped the crowd.

From there, we were taken on a tour of the design of the computer mouse, female anatomical colonialism, ASCII nudes, sex worker websites, and “pussy capital,” all thoroughly sourced on Mindy’s Are.na channel. The presentation culminated in a warning cry, that the technology built—knowingly or otherwise—on the sexual labor of women is now trying to write them out of the equation, creating “AI generated hot girls” like Replika, which for a time was the only sextable AI chat bot.

I will not share the presentation’s twist ending, in hopes that you have the chance to experience it for yourself. Browse the Are.na references and you’ll probably piece it together. I will share Mindy’s message to donate to the Red Umbrella Fund, which is the only global fund dedicated to protecting the rights of sex workers.

It was captivating to be so aware of the presence of one’s tech, and so unable to use it in the free-flowing, dopamine-driven way that we usually do. “This will be an exercise in restraint.” To say any more would defeat the purpose. 🪢

FEMBOTS HAVE FEELINGS TOO