Any_Voice Vs. Mindy Seu: Designer, Lecturer and Harvard Graduate
With places like Instagram, Facebook, Twitter and Google mirroring the world we currently live in, it’s hard for young people to remember a world without the internet. Not many people know the digital space like Mindy Seu does. Mindy digs deep, meaning she finds the crevices that may be overlooked and is able to revive it in an interactive and righteous way — she’s saving relics of our past through innovative digital design.
Mindy has created spaces for publications like Avant Garde, Eros, FACT and Sweethearts while also working with studios like 2x4, lecturing across the United States, and creating interfaces for digital archives at Harvard. She’s the composer of rebirths in printed publications to digital art and in a sense, these works hold a touching and beautiful space to how she’s decided to showcase information. She mentions, “It’s all about translation and the authorship involved in that” which has correlated to her work and mission, as well as the audience that she educates.
We sit down with Mindy to see her aspirations towards the digital world, what the future entails towards web, her curiosity and what’s been inspiring her lately towards her research.
Thanks for taking your time with us Mindy. Your repertoire is pretty impressive when it comes to your creative work. Can you explain your area of focus in design?
Thanks Dorentina! I was trained as a graphic designer in an unusual program called Design Media Art at UCLA. It was very multidisciplinary, so I quickly learned the importance of using different media, rather than staying siloed.
My current research focuses on digital archives and their interfaces. What are novel ways of displaying and distributing knowledge online? My work in this space also explores their ethical foundations, reshaping the histories we’ve been taught, and focusing on free access. Archives should display the larger context in which the work was created — moving towards a response to conditions rather than passive consumption of inherited knowledge.
I’m also interested in computational poetry, interface aesthetics, and early computer art. This also ties into how we can think of digitization of printed works or how to preserve born-digital art. It’s all about translation and the authorship involved in that. Before going to graduate school, I worked as an interactive installation designer, so I bring this spatial thinking to my work now, even if it’s mainly screen-based.
You are currently completing your graduate degree at Harvard, which is a renowned university that’s known pretty much all over the world. What are the things that you have appreciated or seen that make this graduate program special to you?
The program is nested in the Graduate School of Design, which focuses on the built environment, but my concentration is called Art, Design and the Public Domain. It’s post-professional, so the program is very unstructured and self-driven. Students can create their own curricula and have access to all classes offered at Harvard and MIT. In an undergraduate program, you’ve already been in school for 14 years so your college experience might be taken for granted. After working in a studio for years, choosing to go back to school and spend two years focusing on my own practice feels like a luxury. The program is also an MDes (Master in Design Studies) rather than an MFA, so my final thesis will manifest as a research project rather than artwork.
You’ve gotten praise for your works of archiving Avant Garde, Eros with Jon Gacnik and now FACT. You seem to be on it when it comes to staying organized and making sure the viewer can navigate through research and publications. What did you find was lacking when it came to finding information or research through the internet?
Oftentimes there is so much content online that is uncredited, incomplete, and hard to search. How do you surface meaningful content? I’m very interested in content-specific interfaces for microsites that encourages serendipitous discovery. Microsites, in my opinion, are smaller sites that act as a showcase, but showing a tightly curated, comprehensive look at material that might be buried elsewhere. You’re able to dig into the details of a publication, film, or other media because it is isolated and highlighted. Otherwise this is difficult to see in an information overload. The most important part, for me, is generosity of content. I want to give comprehensive, in-depth overviews of specific works, distribute it for free, and make them accessible to everyone.
The web is pretty much a newborn baby compared to the history of media. What are your theories on what the future of the internet will become 5 years from now?
Currently I’m a summer fellow at the Internet Archive, art directing and organizing the Creative Uses track for the Decentralized Web Summit. It will gather the forefathers of the Internet, founders of the top decentralized technology companies, as well as artists, policymakers and humanitarians. The internet as we know it is increasingly policed — users are surveilled, tracked, and datafied. It is no longer the optimistic, utopic vision of its hippie origin story. Decentralization means we can have tightly-knit online communities, without relying on the same platform monopolies like Facebook, Google, etc. Peer-to-peer (p2p) computing means that each user is part of the architecture, which means we will inherently hold more responsibility in how we use and sculpt this new network.
Inspiration is everywhere around us and can be picked up by almost anything and everything. Do you seem to find a pattern in where you find inspiration or what seems to push your work further?
I love digging around in old book stores. It’s like a treasure hunt. It is such a wealth of content, with hidden gems waiting to be uncovered. The structures of bookstores, and bookshelves, encourage the aforementioned “serendipitous discovery” because you can randomly stumble upon something sitting next to each other on shelves, stacked on top of each other, or tucked away in a box. Using found content or historical content, to me, is not about nostalgia or ancestral worship, but to uncover the similar threads that we are thinking about today.
What’s a fine artist you admire or a piece of work that you gravitate to?
I love language and word play, so I was instantly attracted to the work of Antoine Catala. He has created sculptural, kinetic pictograms that move through space. The playful pieces use rebus, or visual puns, which is the use of visual image to convey a word or phrase. Imagine entering a white cube and seeing emoticons we use daily, like : ) or </3, crawling on the gallery floor. It’s language as sculpture, filled with humor and play, and pushing the relationships between object=word=image.
Works shown below:
- Abracadabra
- </3 >(///)<
- Phantom Limbs
Lastly, since you are a lecturer and educator, can you give advice to creatives who are still trying to figure this whole thing out or have ideas that are stored but don’t really know how to execute it just quite yet?
It’s easy to be seduced by the lure of big client names. But there are so many people around you that have equally impressive content that should be shared. While in school, the most precious resource are those around you. These are the people with which you’ll collaborate for years after graduating. It’s also important to recognize that what’s seen online is all about positioning. It’s easy to make something look pristine from a few documentation photos. Don’t compare your work to that! Instead, focus on honing your own aesthetic and ideology, making projects with friends, and being generous with your work.
You can visit Mindy Seu’s portfolio by clicking here.
Thank you for reading our sit down with Mindy Seu. Any_ is an experience design studio in New York City focusing on digital creative platforms, human experiences, and a curated community. Any_Voice sits on the brink of what’s ahead in technology, design and culture. A platform where we set out to find individuals and topics who are paving the way in society and creation. Log onto weareany.com to contact us or find out more.
