Contextualizing Cyberfeminism

Base image: Sollfrank, Cornelia & Old Boys Network ed. 1998. First Cyberfeminist International. Hamburg: obn, CC BY 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.

Critical Media Lab invites everyone to a conversation on contextualizing Cyberfeminism in the present, with inputs by the group “Revisiting Cyberfeminism”, Mindy Seu and Winnie Soon. Initiated by “Revisiting Cyberfeminism”, the discussion is hosted by Lucie Kolb and Stefanie Bräuer from the IXDM research project Sharing Knowledge in the Arts.

Our starting point is the observation that Cyberfeminism resists definition, remaining productive through its diversity, openness, and indeterminacy.

The reflections of this evening are organized around four themes: motivations to engage with cyberfeminism, its definition(s), questions around community, and critical reflections.

Through these lenses, we examine how Cyberfeminism can be reimagined within digital cultures and whether it can move beyond its Western-centered origins toward more inclusive, plural articulations.

You can join the conversation on-site in Basel or online via Zoom. All are welcome, no registration needed.

Revisiting Cyberfeminism is an initiative by a group of intersectional feminist Wikipedia projects and individuals who came together through their work and feminist engagement on the German-language Wikipedia. In 2024, they organised themselves in Berlin and Delhi for the first time in this formation, Revisiting Cyberfeminism, both online and offline. They researched the term and the protagonists of cyberfeminism using archives and oral history. Part of Revisiting Cyberfeminism are Athina Petsou (London/Athens), Who writes his_tory? (Basel/Hamburg) and Wiki Riot Squad (Berlin). “Revisiting Cyberfeminism” is also a text published in 2011 by Susanna Paasonen.

Mindy Seu 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 and awarded the Graham Foundation Grant, the book’s international book tour featured 89 performative readings across 18 countries with sold out events at the New Museum (NYC), Whitechapel Gallery (London), Amant Foundation (Brooklyn), Lafayette Anticipations (Paris), among others. In 2025, Seu began touring a new lecture performance called A SEXUAL HISTORY OF THE INTERNET along with an eponymous artist book. The Fall 2025 leg hosted sold-out events at Pioneer Works (NYC), KW (Berlin), Museum of Contemporary Art (MOCA) (Los Angeles), and Museum of Contemporary Art (MOT) (Tokyo), among others. Her latest writing surveys online cultures, feminist economies, and the materiality of the internet for publications including Criterion Collection and Spike Art Magazine. She has lectured internationally at cultural institutions (MoMA, Barbican Centre) and academic institutions (Harvard University, Columbia University, Central Saint Martins), amongst others. Mindy 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. Mindy is currently an Associate Professor at University of California, Los Angeles in the Department of Design Media Arts.

Winnie Soon is a Hong Kong-born artist coder and researcher interested in the cultural implications of digital infrastructure that addresses wider power asymmetries with a particular interest in computational publishing, code and software. Their artistic and scholarly works engage with themes such as Free and Open Source Culture, Coding Otherwise, artistic/technical manuals, digital censorship and minor technology. With works appearing in museums, galleries, festivals, distributed networks, papers and alternative written forms, including co-authored books titled Boundary Images (2023), Fix My Code (2021), and Aesthetic Programming (2020). Winnie is the co-editor of the Software Studies Book Series (MIT Press), Co-PI of the research project Digital Activism and co-research lead, British Digital Art, British Art Network. Artistically, Winnie received the Golden Nica at Ars Electronica (Artificial Intelligence and Life Art Category), the Expanded Media Award for Network Culture at Stuttgarter Filmwinter — Festival for Expanded Media, WRO 2019 Media Art Biennale Award, and the 26th and 17th ifva awards (Special Mention and Silver award). Currently, they are Associate Professor of Art and Technology at UCL – Slade School of Fine Art, Associate Professor (on leave) at Aarhus University and visiting researcher at the Centre of the Study of the Networked Image (CSNI), London South Bank University.

Sharing Knowledge in the Arts is an SNSF-funded research project (2023–2027) which investigates open access practices with a focus on THEswissTHING. The project has gathered extensive data – including documentary and archival material on THEswissTHING – and conducted video-recorded interviews with involved artists, curators, and theorists, using oral history to contextualize the material. The resulting research data is made publicly accessible through a visualization based on a graph database as well as a database of HGK Basel’s Mediathek.

Suggested Readings