CONFERENCE PRESENTER (virtual)

Co-Author: Lauren Holden

Design as Archive: The Cyberfeminism Index
Abstract: The Cyberfeminisim Index lives at the intersection of design, technology, and historical anthology. Its form reframes the role of editor in the preservation of historical information, flattens the hierarchy of ownership in our increasingly transient and digital world, and expands the role of design as a lens through which information is given context. The metaphorical transience inherent to our contemporary digital lives is one facet of calls for the decolonization of histories. One approach to this decolonization is to rethink the role of the editor in the writing of histories. The Cyberfeminism Index does just this: designer is designer—but also collector and facilitator. This project allows for many editors, and therefore becomes a container capable of multiple simultaneous interpretations of the topic in a uniquely digital setting.

The Cyberfeminism Index premiered with New Museum’s First Look online exhibition in 2020. The Index is described by New Museum as “an in-progress online collection of resources for techno-critical works from 1990–2020, gathered and facilitated by Mindy Seu”; it is described by Mindy Seu as “INCOMPLETE and ALWAYS IN PROGRESS.” The Index is built as a series of hyperlinks that can be organized either by author, title, or date (similar to an Excel spreadsheet). It also contains a section called “Collections,” in which various editors have been called to assemble series of entries from the index they feel best embody the idea of cyberfeminism.

This paper explores the ways in which the Cyberfeminism Index challenges the cannon of historical presentation and preservation, and the ways in which the Index can be seen as a neoteric benchmark for future online-based archives—always in flux, continually reframed by contributors, and forever re-contextualized by guest editors.

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