Home / Events / Intersectional Bodies/Genders/Images/Technologies: Ambiguous Practices and Theory in the Cyberfeminism Index
CCBT Meetup

Intersectional Bodies/Genders/Images/Technologies: Ambiguous Practices and Theory in the Cyberfeminism Index

2023.11.25(Sat)
Civic Creative Base Tokyo [CCBT]
Date & Time
November 25 (Sat), 2023 13:00 pm –19:00 pm
Venue
Civic Creative Base Tokyo [CCBT]
Capacity
90 (first-come, first-served)
Admission
Free
Accessibility and Support
with simultaneous Japanese-English interpretation

The Cyberfeminism Index encompasses projects, activities, and artworks by artists, researchers, and activists from various regions, standpoints, and positions, all searching for new forms of human identity.
This lecture and symposium is the first comprehensive introduction in Japan to the project’s practices.

The Cyberfeminism Index project, which takes the form of an online exhibition and book, has attracted much attention in the international art, technology, and design worlds. In conjunction with the visit to Japan by Mindy Seu, a designer and researcher, and the curator and author behind the project, Civic Creative Base Tokyo will host an edition of its talk and lecture series CCBT Meetup.

The event considers art and technology in Japanese society in terms of feminism and the history of technology, and provides the first comprehensive showcase in Japan to the Cyberfeminism Index’s practices. By referencing creative activities that utilize art and digital technology, the event offers an opportunity to rediscover previously neglected works and contexts, and also encounter images and discourses that transcend gender differences.

The Cyberfeminism Index is a book and online exhibition jointly created with Rhizome, an organization affiliated with the New Museum, New York, that exhibits, digitally archives, and preserves born-digital art. Cyberfeminism refers not only to resistance to gender hierarchies in art and science, and the feminist activism that has developed and spread through the internet, but also to Donna Haraway’s seminal 1985 essay “A Cyborg Manifesto,” which employed the concept of the cyborg (a living creature with mechanical parts) to argue for a departure from binaries like nature and culture, public and private, and man and woman, and advocate for global and societal change that transcends such dichotomies. Since its publication, the essay has been incredibly influential in gender studies as well as entertainment and art, and various works and activities embodying Haraway’s cyborg concept have emerged particularly on online platforms. The Cyberfeminism Index contains over seven hundred different online practices, from academic texts to social movements, art projects, net art, and new media art, and continues to be updated. It reveals discourses and practices by diverse kinds of people about images of the body and identities that go beyond conventional human gender differences.

On “Intersectional Bodies/Genders/Images/Technologies: Ambiguous Practices and Theory in the Cyberfeminism Index”
Curation: Mizushina Mami

The Cyberfeminism Index launched online in 2020. The accompanying book was published in 2022 and a tour marking the release has held events around the world. This lecture and symposium forms part of that book tour with the aim of showcasing and introducing the concept of cyberfeminism in Japan.
Notably, the content of the index brings together contributions from both experts as well as the website visitors, and the indexing makes a conscious effort to center non-Western practices. Rooted in a critique of feminism, this approach has resulted in a highly diverse collection of resources. The index contains works and practices from different fields, with a focus on art but also encompassing activism, manifestos and theories like Dona Haraway’s “A Cyborg Manifesto,” and critiques of such discourses.
As Mindy Seu writes in her introduction to the book, the Cyberfeminism Index neither deals exclusively with feminism nor focuses only on technology. The individual practices it contains engage with various problems from our present reality and cannot be encapsulated in a single definition. This event will begin from that unfinished, incomplete state of mutation.

Photography by HarryGriffin

https://cyberfeminismindex.com/


Outline

Intersectional Bodies/Genders/Images/Technologies:
Ambiguous Practices and Theory in the Cyberfeminism Index
Date & Time: November 25 (Sat), 2023 13:00 pm –19:00 pm (doors open: 12:30 pm, incl. break)
Venue: Civic Creative Base Tokyo [CCBT]
Capacity: 90 (first come, first served)
with simultaneous Japanese-English interpretation
Speakers:
Mindy Seu (Designer, Technologist)
Melanie Hoff (Artist, Organizer, Educator)
Shikata Yukiko (Curator, Critic))
Takahashi Sakino (Translator)
Fuse Rintaro (Artist)
Mizushina Mami (Independent curator, Art coordinator)

Time Line


13:00-13:05 Introduction

13:05-16:40
[Part 1]Meetups for the Past to Come

  • Lecture 1 “Cyberfeminism Index: The Volatile, Drifting, Invisible Body”
    Speaker: Mizushina Mami
  • Lecture 2 “Cybernetics of Sex” *Title has been changed.
    Melanie Hoff *Online
  • Lecture 3 “Body as a Site and Node”
    Takahashi Sakino
  • Lecture 4 “Lovers in the Network : 30 Years of Body, Gender and Reality”
    Fuse Rintaro
  • Q&A

17:00-19:00
[Part 2]Thinking about Future Art/Design from the Cyberfeminism Index

  • Keynote “Cyberfeminism Index Performative Reading”
    Speaker:Mindy Seu
  • Discussion and Q&A
    Panelists:Mindy Seu, Shikata Yukiko, Takahashi Sakino, Fuse Rintaro, Mizushina Mami

MindySeu氏アーティスト写真
Photo: Alexa Viscius

Mindy Seu

Designer, Technologist

Mindy Seu is a designer and technologist based in New York City, currently teaching as an Assistant Professor at Rutgers Mason Gross School of the Arts and Critic at Yale School of Art. Her expanded practice involves archival projects, techno-critical writing, performative lectures, and design commissions. Her latest writing surveys feminist economies, historical precursors of the metaverse, and the materiality of the internet. Mindy’s ongoing Cyberfeminism Index, which gathers three decades of online activism and net art, was commissioned by Rhizome, presented at the New Museum, and awarded a Graham Foundation Grant. She holds an M.Des. from Harvard’s Graduate School of Design and a B.A. in Design Media Arts from the University of California, Los Angeles.

https://mindyseu.com

Melanie Hoff

Artist, Organizer, Educator

Melanie Hoff is a co-director of the School for Poetic Computation, and cofounder of Hex House, they strive to cultivate spaces of learning and feeling that encourage honesty, poetry and reconciliation for the ways we are shaped by intersecting systems of classification and power. Melanie engages hacking and performance to express the absurdities of these systems while revealing encoded ways they influence how we choose to live and what choices have been made for us. They teach about sex, technology, and social cybernetics at the School for Poetic Computation, Yale University, New York University, and have shown work at the New Museum, the Queens Museum and elsewhere.

https://www.melaniehoff.com
四方幸子氏ポートレート写真

Shikata Yukiko

Curator, Critic

President of AICA (International Association of Art Critics) Japan, artistic Director of “Forest for Dialogue and Creativity”. Visiting professor at Tama Art University and Tokyo Zokei University, lecturer at Musashino Art University and Institute of Advanced Media Arts and Sciences (IAMAS) and Kyoto University of the Arts. Her activities traverse existing fields by focusing on “Information flows”. In parallel, working as a curator of Cannon ARTLAB (1990-2001), Mori Art Museum (2002-2004), senior curator of NTT InterCommunication Center[ICC] (2004-2010), as an independent curator, realized many experimental exhibitions and projects. Juror of many international competitions. Published “Ecosophic Art” in 2023, many co-publications.

http://yukikoshikata.com
高橋さきの氏ポートレート写真

Takahashi Sakino

Translator

Born in Tokyo in 1957, Takahashi Sakino is an adjunct instructor at Ochanomizu University. She completed a master’s degree at the Graduate School of Agricultural Sciences at the University of Tokyo. She has translated and written widely in the fields of science and technology and gender studies. Her publications include translations of Donna Haraway’s Simians, Cyborgs and Women (2000, Seidosha) and When Species Meet (2013, Seidosha), and “Anthropocene, Capitalocene, Plantationocene, Chthulucene” (Gendai Shiso, December 2017), and essays such as “Proclamation as a Living Creature: The State of the Cyborg Today” (2016, Iwanami Shoten) and “Don’t Trust Graphs: The Non-Science that Experts Induce” (2017, Ronsosha).

布施琳太郎プロフィール
Photo: Takehisa Naoki

Fuse Rintaro

Artist

Born in 1994. He produces “new loneliness” that can be possible in cities since the release of the iPhone through painting and video works, website production, writing criticism and poetry, exhibition planning, etc. The main solo exhibition is “New Corpse = Dead Corpus” (2022, PARCO Museum Tokyo). Major exhibition projects include “Planet Samasa” (2022, Former site of Odaka Binding Factory, Tokyo), “Quarantine Close Contact Chamber” (2020, web page). In addition, he presented his works at the 21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art, Kanazawa, NTT InterCommunication Center, and art festivals in various places. In November this year (2023), a collection of poems Catalogue of Tears will be published by PARCO Publishing.

Mizushina Mami

Independent curator, Art coordinator

Mizushina Mami has curated and organized exhibitions and events in Japan and abroad as well as worked at international festivals, art museums, and other cultural institutions. She studied media art and literature analysis at university in Japan and then earned an MFA in curating from Goldsmiths, University of London. She specializes in fields where societal, technological, and artistic issues intersect with the emotions and rights of the individual, including BioArt, activism, hacktivism, and queer art practices. Mizushina is currently working on an event related to Mindy Seu’s Cyberfeminism Index, and a solo exhibition in 2024 featuring an artist based in London and Berlin. She engages in various activities that connect contemporary theory, art, and artists in Japan and overseas.

Organizer
Tokyo Metropolitan Government, Civic Creative Base Tokyo [CCBT] (Arts Council Tokyo, Tokyo Metropolitan Foundation for History and Culture)

*Guests and content is subject to change.
*Mindy Seu’s visit to Japan and appearance at this event is made possible by funding from the Toshiaki Ogasawara Memorial Foundation.
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