While the field of artificial intelligence is dominated by men, there are an overwhelming amount of instances where artificial intelligence technology is gendered as female, such as an instance in digital voice assistants like Amazon’s Alexa or Apple’s Siri. To be female is the default in AI-assisted technology, and yet, despite this, there is very little space that represents mothers and the labour of mothering.
Observing a lack of mother-like figures in the multitudes of AI-generated work, Mother Machines is a series created through a persistent prompting strategy that produces as many mothers/mothering-related imagery as the machine can possibly churn out. The project reproduces mothers not as saintly figures, but as tired, strained, multi-tasking, labouring and sometimes even in tears. Mother Machines continually pushes the AI model to (re)imagine notions of mothering, what it means to be a mother, and the act of birthing, making visible the invisibility of gendered work in motherhood.
Shown at:
- Feminism in Public Space project by Designathon, Zurich, March 2023
- BeFantastic TechArt Teasers, Samsung Opera House, Bengaluru, November 2022