Five Minute Feature • Mindy Seu for Art on James
Art on James
August 21, 2026
Notes From Online
James St (JS), Mindy Seu (MS)
Ahead of her first Brisbane performance of A Sexual History of the Internet for Art on James, we spent five minutes with designer, educator and researcher Mindy Seu.
Seu’s practice moves through online culture, internet histories and the relationship between technology and the body, so we asked her about the smaller traces of a life lived online: open tabs, first usernames, lost websites, old files and what we choose to keep.
The result is part digital archaeology, part personal archive, with a bad ear piercing, DuckDuckGo and a very durable set of archival boxes along the way.
JS: How many tabs do you currently have open?
MS: One… for better or worse, I am primarily one tab at a time, and inbox zero, more often than not.
JS: What was your first username?
MS: Almost certainly something I’d now consider a security question.
JS: Favourite punctuation mark?
MS: The asterisk. We love it so much, Laura Coombs and I made a workshop about it for Southland Institute years ago.
JS: What’s the oldest file on your computer?
MS: This was a fun prompt! Turns out, it’s a low-res photo of a bad ear piercing, time stamped July 22, 2011 in a folder called “old iPhone images”.
JS: What’s the last thing you Googled?
MS: I’m a DuckDuckGo user, but my last search was sAme sAme, the venue for our post-performance dinner!
JS: Is there a website you wish still existed?
MS: There isn’t one website specifically, but I miss when websites felt more like places than platforms… GeoCities, del.icio.us, old Tumblr, StumbleUpon. These days, the closest to these that I use the most often are Are.na and Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine.
JS: When was the last time you went properly offline?
MS: Relatively recently when I was a resident in my friends’ new pedagogical project in the Swiss countryside. My connection didn’t work, so I ended up having five days wifi-free. So it wasn’t by choice! But much needed.
JS: What’s something you refuse to throw away?
MS: I’m generally a material minimalist, but I hold onto sentimental ephemera from loved ones—particularly notes and letters—which I organize by year in overly durable archival boxes.
JS: When does keeping something become collecting?
MS: Perhaps a collection begins with the ability to recall. Is there metadata? Is there a way to trace the origin? Is it intentionally saved? Keeping preserves the object; collecting preserves its context.
JS: Is there anything you wish you’d documented better?
MS: My grandma’s recipes. I always intended to record her incredible cooking, which seemed to be built entirely on years of muscle memory and intuition rather than any discernible measurement or amount.
JS: What’s something you’ve changed your mind about recently?
MS: It’s good to be bored!
JS: Do you think people reveal more accidentally or deliberately online?
MS: When I first began my online life, overt sentimentality was simply part of growing up online. Now, we’ve learned to treat online posts as a performative broadcast.
JS: Where does nature end and technology begin?
MS: They are interconnected. Technology was born within an ecosystem and remains dependent on one. We tend to think of technology as separate from nature, but it has never existed outside of it.
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