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Mindy Seu on The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction
13 April, 2023
On the occasion of Mindy’s Cyberfeminism Index tour, the WWA editors Emilie Appercé and Jaehee Shin met with her at the Zurich University of the Arts to exchange about the evolution of her project since she launched the website in 2020 and the future of the index, which now exists in both digital and physical form. The interview was recorded and was the object of the first episode of The Author Speaks. The podcast can be listened to here. Mindy brought a series of item, dérivés of the Cyberfeminism Index research. In a previous interview given to The center for Book Arts (CBA), she comments on The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction:
This essay has been important for my practice and for this book overall, it is a tiny chat book. It was just reprinted by ignota press and it has a forword by Donna Haraway who wrote the Cyborg Manifesto amongst many other things. The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction by Ursula Le Guin was published in 1986 and the text posited that the first tool is not the spear which is a tool of dominance but also actually the basket which is a tool of gathering. So not only does it reframe our history of technology and also expand it to include a lot of analogue technologies, not the digital connotation that we all have, it also reframes our history of the Protagonist. So this changes moving from the spear to the basket, it changes from the individual hero to a collective or a community. So, this if anything feels like it, it was highly inspirational for the Cyberfeminism Index which is not only crowdsourced, a collection of material gatherings but also the container itself which maybe the book as a basket the website as a basket and then being able to talk about it with all of you a social gathering in a way.