A Sexual History of the Internet is a polyvocal retelling of sexual technologies in five chapters. The performance gathers artworks, anecdotes, and archival fragments that reveal the pervasive and perverted origins of digital tools. 

The work unfolds in a black box theater. There is no stage, projector, or spotlight—only the audience, each person holding a phone. Chairs are scattered; no one faces the same direction. On cue, participants open the Instagram account @asexualhistoryoftheinternet. Then a countdown: 3, 2, 1, click. The room goes dark, and each face is illuminated by their screen.

For 45 minutes, Instagram Stories autoplay. The performance exploits a constraint of the platform: when you cannot touch the screen, images remain for five seconds and videos up to one minute. Hundreds of slides build into a durational script. By prohibiting clicking, the work retrains the reflex of doomscrolling and transforms a feed into choreography. Instagram Stories become a score; the audience becomes a chorus. The isolating act of looking at your phone becomes collective.

Each attendee is assigned one of five colors corresponding to quotations they must read aloud. These citations are from artists, lawyers, sex workers, and historians. There is power in having a ritualized recitation of stories by those who are not typically cited, let alone spoken aloud. It is an embodied citation. 

The project extends into an artist book: a facsimile of the Instagram script developed after prototype accounts were repeatedly deleted. It operates as a “little black book,” a vehicle for safety networks. The book is also a financial experiment. When you buy this book, profits are redistributed to those cited within. It is a new model of attribution.  

Part performance, part publication, part financial experiment, the work reframes social media as a script. It reveals marginalized histories of technology and proposes citation as collective action. It is a performance of re-citation.

Artist, author: Mindy Seu
Designer: Laura Coombs
Editor: Meg Miller
Lecture format collaborator: Julio Correa
Illustrator: Ven Qiu
Timecodes scripting: Jon Gacnik
Videographer: Gabriel Noguez
Photography: Tim Schutsky
3D Artist: Tom Hancocks
Website support: Charles Broskoski
Metalabel: Yancey Strickler, Lena Imamura
Printer: DZA

Mindy Seu (US) is an artist and technologist based in New York City and Los Angeles whose practice focuses on technology-driven performance and publication. In 2023, Seu published Cyberfeminism Index, a pseudo-encyclopedic book that gathers three decades of online activism and net art. Commissioned by New Museum’s Rhizome, the book’s international book tour featured 89 performative readings across 18 countries. In 2025, Seu began touring a new lecture performance called A Sexual History of the Internet, along with an eponymous artist book. Seu is currently an Associate Professor at University of California, Los Angeles, Department of Design Media Arts.

The jury recognized in A Sexual History of the Internet an inventive and politically sharp rethinking of performance, spectatorship, and digital culture. Mindy Seu transforms the privatized act of scrolling through social media into a collective ritual of reading, critical reflection, and embodied citation. Performed through synchronized Instagram Stories and spoken recitations by the audience itself, the work turns the isolating logic of the feed into a shared choreographic experience. Through roughly fifty citations across this multimodal project—spanning performance, publication, and financial redistribution—the work assembles voices and histories long suppressed within dominant narratives of technological development.