Friday Fives: Mindy Seu
October 06, 2023
In our Friday Fives series, we give #highfives to a different designer from our extended family of PNCA students, faculty, alumni, and guest lecturers. 🙌🏽🙌🏾🙌🏻 This week, we're featuring Mindy Seu, who is visiting us on October 11, 2023 to explore her project Cyberfeminism Index, for our Fall 2023 Design Lecture Series. Register via eventbrite to watch the livestream of the talk, or better yet, join us in person in the PNCA Mediatheque at 6:30pm for a watch party with the our extended design community!
Graphic Design department head Kristin Rogers Brown spoke with Mindy in October, 2023.
Q: What or who inspires you?
A: My friends and community; I truly believe in peer mentoring.
Q: What do you do to get “unstuck?”
How do you want to shape design?
A: I believe in an expanded definition of design that starts with research, an inquiry or curiosity that yields obsessive rigor, and then allowing the formal output to emerge from that.
Don't put it down, put it away.
Q: What is one thing you want to learn right now?
A: I’m trying to relearn piano. I played for 12 years growing up, but it was forced upon me so I didn’t enjoy it, and now I’m trying to reclaim it for myself.
What is your favorite trick for “keeping it all together”?
A: File management is key. I like to say, “Don’t put it down, put it away.” If I receive any new material, whether it’s a PDF or a link, I immediately slot it into a folder or spreadsheet.
Q: A good question from a previous guest… “How did your upbringing affect your creative development?”
A: My mom was a painter and my dad was an engineer, so this blend of emotive form and logic ended up in me.
Mindy Seu iMindy 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. 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.
This talk is part of Mindy’s Cyberfeminism Index book tour, and is co-hosted by PNCA Design and the MFA program in Critical Studies.
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To see more from Mindy, visit her website or follow her on instagram @MindySeu.
Hear more from Mindy at the Design Lecture Series on 10/12/23, presenting Cyberfeminism Index and talking with students and community.
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The Fall 2023 Design Lecture Series is in person, and online, free, and open to the public. We are livestreaming select talks with registration on Eventbrite. This event is co-presented by PNCA Graphic Design and the MFA in Critical Studies, and hosted by graphic design department members Kristin Rogers Brown and Flo Von Grote.
Follow along with our #fridayfives on instagram @pncadesign.