Metalabel, Dark Forest Collective, book, ISBN 979-8992936414, English, 704 pages, 2025, USA

A Sexual History of the Internet is an artist’s book by Mindy Seu and forms one of three parts of an elaborate strategy intertwining publishing and performance. The author uses the seven hundred pages of this small-format book as a script – more aesthetically a ‘libretto’ – for her performances, in which the audience is actively involved through their smartphones’ Instagram accounts, sometimes reading aloud citations together in a polyvocal lecture. The audience is shown how our devices can literally serve as extensions of the body, and how to conceptually disrupt their intended use. The book itself, printed entirely in silver ink on black pages, contains the texts and static visuals for this experiment, gathering further critical facts, voices, anecdotes, and artefacts in a consistent and compelling trajectory through the history of technology, cyberfeminism, sex workers’ perspectives, and the ongoing interplay between desire, machines, and power. If that were not enough, there is a third part to the strategy. Beyond being extremely careful in providing sources for all the material, the book enables an experiment in profit redistribution, honouring the forty-five authors who provided citations, each of whom will receive 30 per cent of the profits. A brilliantly engineered and executed experiment, it challenges the topic in both content and form.

 

Mindy Seu – A Sexual History of the Internet