Mindy Seu is a designer and researcher. She holds an MDes from Harvard's Graduate School of Design and BA in Design Media Arts from University of California, Los Angeles. As a fellow at the Berkman Klein Center for the Internet and Society at Harvard Law School, she created an archive of cyberfeminism. She has also been a fellow at the Internet Archive, co-organizing the Arts Track of the inaugural Decentralized Web Summit. Formerly she was a designer on 24's Interactive Media team and the Museum of Modern Art's in-house design studio. She has given lectures and workshops at CalArts, Parsons, Pratt, RISD, Berkeley Art Museum, and A-B-Z-TXT, among others. Seu joined the faculty of California College of the Arts in 2016, and Mason Gross School of the Arts and Yale's School of Art in 2019.
Mindy Seu mentioned her wish to emphasize the interstitial space of the website because there are allies that can be found in the space. How do you interpret this? Does the reading change the way you think about the design of this index?
Tina Li
I browse the Internet feminism website, which has a detailed collection of articles on Internet feminism from 1985 to 2020. Views from articles read, Sharing as Survival! I love it. People like to share everything on the Internet, personal, knowledge, and life... Do you think online sharing has more advantages than disadvantages? if there is a ton of information, How to make the web development by itself? What do you think we can contribute to social networks? what topic is valuable?
Dong Xia
Mindy Seu considered herself as a‘shy person’, yet she is a digital hoarder who loves collecting and organizing. Instead of focusing on engineering, the military industrial complex, and the architecture and protocol she created Cyberfeminism Index. If you were her, what kind of‘web’ would you create? what kind of information you would like to collect or organize? Interestingly, Seu mentioned she hoped for an environmental web if separated from social justice.
Ruolin Fu
Apart from this topic, do you think gather a series of information and lay them out in one media like a website would be a successful work? What do you think it’s differences comparing with a history book, more abstract? have a better visual design?
Mark Huang
Seu mentions attempting to futureproof her website is an impossible task but“they” tried their best to. Even if the website’s communication is changed to be“current”, would it ever be futureproofed as the content itself was created and applicable to concepts of the“past”?
Tegwen McKenzie
Seu references Nabil Hassein and Geoff Han’s work on the physicality of the internet. For example, server farms require large amounts of water and energy, cell phones rely on the mining of rare earth minerals, and even sending an email has a carbon footprint.
Yet, Seu still persists that there is a better term for those who use the internet than‘users’. Considering all the environmental effects of the internet, are we not users? What‘name’ would you use instead?
Yining Zhu
I'm sure we, as art students, all have lots of digital files stored on our computers or hard drive. Do you have an archives system? Have you ever go back and browse into old files and how does that make you feel?
Karan Chowdhary
Vern Liu
Mindy Seu mentioned Cyberfeminism Index is an incomplete and in progress project. When we try to translate different pieces of informations/historical evidence into a form that’s unique and approachable to the audiences, should we tend to be more truthful or it should be more personal and adjusting the info to fit our personal opinion?
Thao Tran
To call the website incomplete and always in progress, I was wondering if she ever hoped that feminism would come to an end, and there would be solutions for the issues she mentioned?
Jess Chen
Currently, many of the feminist revolts and demonstrations are being considered a party or celebration even by the protesters themselves and belonging to the movement. This causes many people to mark these important dates as one more holiday instead of a date to seriously claim for women's rights. Do you think that the current feminist revolts fulfill their advocacy role on women's rights and social awareness? Since Seu mentioned about“Cyberfeminism”. I am wondering could we escape gender online?
Samantha Laite
A little less of a question and more a comment and recognition of the importance of the work she did is. While this project seems highly personal it also is an important resource and connection for others. In the interview she comments on the idea of not participating on giant platforms and I question if in this day we can go back to the basics of web and not need the intricate platforms we use now?
Grace Yang
Her approach on developing ideas is interesting, she summarized this approach as“never complete and always in progress!” I’m wondering if she gave any specific direction for the ideas to develope when she make progress based on the incomplete ideas.
🔭 Project 3: Notes from the Field
(9 weeks)
This project is to be done in pairs. Based on your ongoing learnings from the class(including readings, discussions, projects, and guest lectures), develop an online notebook. The publication must exist on the internet as a microsite and accommodate multiple entries(minimum 6, with text and images or solely text), allowing for it to expand over time as you collect your thoughts until the end of the semester.
Considerations
What are your notes like? What are your partner’s? Do you collect loose reflections on class themes or fully formed sentences? Do you document dialogue, quotes and reference materials? Will you keep track of the weather or other unexpected details for each entry?
What’s your editorial strategy?
How do you establish a hierarchy for different kinds of information within the page?
How often do you add to the site? Are posts short and brief but many or long-form and there are fewer of them?
What does the microsite look like? What does it feel like? Are you coding a website from scratch or using an existing web platform to host your entries?
Is the notebook always the same or does it have potential to change as it grows?
💬 Group Discussion
🔭 Project 3: Notes from the Field