‘A Sexual History of the Internet’ invites SU to create online ecosystem
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Many people use their phones to take pictures of artwork at museums. But Mindy Seu’s performance piece “A Sexual History of the Internet” goes a step further — it’s a participatory lecture conducted entirely through Instagram stories.
“I like to keep everything as open and online as possible,” Seu said. “It’s in a living online environment.”
“A Sexual History of the Internet,” which has been performed in New York City, Berlin and cities around the world since its premiere last September, came to Syracuse Tuesday night for a show at the Nancy Cantor Warehouse.
The roughly hour-long performance featured auto-playing Instagram stories that the entire audience watched on their phones. At the same time, Seu, an associate professor in the Department of Design Media Arts at the University of California, Los Angeles, walked around the room narrating.
The lecture — which has an accompanying artist book with the same title — covered the internet’s place in sexuality, exploring topics like the origins of online sex work and sexual images generated by artificial intelligence.
Throughout the project, Seu and her interactive audience explore how technology was shaped by sexuality and how it influenced sexuality.
Before the performance began, Seu asked the audience to turn their phones’ brightness and volume all the way up. While she narrated most of the lecture, the audience took turns reading some parts aloud.
Lauren Baker, the Art Exhibition Operations Coordinator at Syracuse University’s College of Visual and Performing Arts, said the event took eight months to plan. Baker said working with Seu — an artist and technologist who’s garnered international attention — was a memorable experience.
“It was something that was really exciting for me, personally, because I’ve admired her work for quite some time,” Baker said. “And this is the first time for me to work with an artist of that caliber.”
With student participants from VPA’s Setnor School of Music, the Women’s and Gender Studies Department and other programs across campus, Baker said she was pleased to see a diverse group of students and faculty members take part in the performance.
Baker encouraged SU junior Ruby Queen, a studio art major, to attend the performance. Much of Queen’s own work focuses on sexual content and intimacy, but through a “fun, flirty, feminine” perspective. So the topic interested her, she said.
The most memorable moment of the lecture for Queen was watching her own phone and observing those around her doing the same simultaneously.
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“The whole performance just sucks you into your phone and to the environment around you,” Queen said.
Christian Jones, a second-year graduate student studying art photography in VPA, heard about the event from multiple professors and said he couldn’t miss it. Hearing the videos from the lecture play simultaneously on everyone’s phones was “a really haunting experience,” Jones said.
Jones encourages anyone to attend a performance if it comes to their city, calling it a “once-in-a-lifetime opportunity.”
Seu, who has performed the lecture more than 20 times at this point, said she feels “kind of high” afterwards.
“It starts to feel like an incantation or like a Catholic mass,” Seu said. “It’s very energizing, but also very calming simultaneously.”
“A Sexual History of the Internet” made its way to Syracuse because of film and media arts professor Boryana Dragoeva, who knows Seu through a cyberfeminist community. While Dragoeva had seen videos of the performance, seeing it live was completely different, she said.
“When you see a live performance, you have this presence of the body,” Dragoeva said. “Presence that the air around you changed.”
Despite following the same script and materials for every event — no matter the city — Seu said the audience is what makes every lecture special.
“Some people have seen versions of it online and kind of have an understanding. Some people are coming in with no expectations, but either way, performance is a living ecosystem,” Seu said. “So even if you get a glimpse, being there and having the energy of the room will always make it feel unique.”
