"OUR PHONES ARE SEX TOYS. An Instastory tells me so. I'm in a very large room in the dark with sixty strangers, and we are all staring at our phones-staring at our sex toys. We're fingering our sex toys, reading our sex toys, consuming a lecture with our sex toys: the most prudish of orgies. Another story pops onto our screens, playing the sound made by a vibration, feeling like a vibration."
"Now a third story gives us a history lesson: "Dildonics," coined by the philosopher Ted Nelson in 1974, means sound that can be turned into physical sensation. Another early thinkers on teledildonics, Howard Rheingold, in 1990 cribbed the AT&T slogan to predict a world of telediddlers: "You will be able to reach out and touch someone." Here we are, and it is happening. The lecturer is vibrating us. We are all vibrating us. We all diddle each other daily."
"The lecturer is Mindy Seu, an artist-scholar and technologist, and the lecture-performance is A Sexual History of the Internet, delivered at MoCA in Los Angeles earlier this month and touring international arts institutions all year. The Instastoried script brings together stories, images, and early Web ephemera to show how sex and sex work built the internet. Seu and the audience join forces to read citations aloud, transforming passive listening into "re-citation," which embodies Seu's philosophy of generously attributing sources and spreading information via word of mouth. Many references come from Seu's Cyberfeminist Index, which began in 2019 as a shared Google spreadsheet, then virally mutated into a crowdsourced online encyclopedia, published in 2023 as a seven-hundred-page book."
An interactive lecture-performance uses audience smartphones to create a shared vibrating experience that literalizes phones as sexual technologies. Historical terms like "dildonics" and predictions by early thinkers link contemporary teledildonic practices to longstanding visions of remote touch. The performance enacts "re-citation" by having attendees read citations aloud, prioritizing generous attribution and oral knowledge transmission. Much of the material derives from the Cyberfeminist Index, which evolved from a shared Google spreadsheet into a crowdsourced seven-hundred-page encyclopedia. A related book redistributes proceeds to those cited, and the project tours major art institutions internationally.
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