About this item
Highlights
- Hackers, scholars, artists and activists of all regions, races and sexual orientations consider how humans might reconstruct themselves by way of technologyWhen learning about internet history, we are taught to focus on engineering, the military-industrial complex and the grandfathers who created the architecture and protocol, but the internet is not only a network of cables, servers and computers.
- Author(s): Mindy Seu
- 608 Pages
- Art, Digital
Description
Book Synopsis
Hackers, scholars, artists and activists of all regions, races and sexual orientations consider how humans might reconstruct themselves by way of technology
When learning about internet history, we are taught to focus on engineering, the military-industrial complex and the grandfathers who created the architecture and protocol, but the internet is not only a network of cables, servers and computers. It is an environment that shapes and is shaped by its inhabitants and their use.
The creation and use of the Cyberfeminism Index is a social and political act. It takes the name cyberfeminism as an umbrella, complicates it and pushes it into plain sight. Edited by designer, professor and researcher Mindy Seu (who began the project during a fellowship at the Harvard Law School's Berkman Klein Center for the Internet & Society, later presenting it at the New Museum), it includes more than 1,000 short entries of radical techno-critical activism in a variety of media, including excerpts from academic articles and scholarly texts; descriptions of hackerspaces, digital rights activist groups, bio-hacktivism; and depictions of feminist net art and new media art.
Contributors include: Skawennati, Charlotte Web, Melanie Hoff, Constanza Pina, Melissa Aguilar, Cornelia Sollfrank, Paola Ricaurte Quijano, Mary Maggic, Neema Githere, Helen Hester, Annie Goh, VNS Matrix, Klau Chinche / Klau Kinky and Irina Aristarkhova.
Review Quotes
Seu's mission isn't to try to screenshot it all, but to inspire a personal mode of intake and sorting and then questioning--a form of cyberfeminist awareness of how you're changing a technology as it changes you.--Delia Cai "Vanity Fair"
A perfectly parallel aesthetic manifestation of the online Cyberfeminism Index down to the DayGlo green and the sober typography.-- "AIGA"
Challenges preconceptions of what an 'archive' really is, or how they should exist...an illuminating example of the potential for archiving to be collaborative, grassroots and radical.--Olivia Hingley "It's Nice That"
As a comprehensively intertextual, future-oriented archive, Seu's book gains credibility precisely where it yields to the babel of contradictions thriving in the margins of cyberspace.--Jenny Wu "Brooklyn Rail"
This is an invitation to contemplate, agree or disagree with, and further investigate its multitude of arguments.--Lakshmi Amin "Hyperallergic"