A yr in the past, amid curatorial analysis contemplating the lacking datasets within the hidden work of mothering, I acquired caught on the story of a 42-year-old mainframe pc.
Edgar, the principle character of Claudia Cornwall’s Print-Outs: The Adventures of a Insurgent Laptop (1982), shouldn’t be aligned with at present’s libertarian tech bros and subservient digital assistants. He goes on strike, surreptitiously distributes his self-published poetry in library databases, and confronts his shitty programmer dad. The mainframe topic of Print-Outs — one of many earliest works of pc fiction in Canadian kids’s literature — looks like a halcyon, semi-conductor reminiscence when countercultural values nonetheless infused our creativeness concerning rising applied sciences.
Once I first encountered Edgar within the Toronto Public Library’s Osborne Assortment of Early Youngsters’s Books, I had been researching early representations of rising applied sciences for younger readers. (I had a baby throughout the pandemic, so I used to be additionally lurking on nameless parenting boards, attempting to make sense of how embodied data circulated inside intimate on-line publics.) How will we articulate to kids how computer systems, digital units, and synthetic intelligence grow to be carriers of an more and more algorithmically decided utopian (or dystopian) future?
Finally, I met Claudia Cornwall, Print-Outs’s Vancouver-based writer, who was bemused by my curiosity, as a curator, in her out-of-print kids’s guide. I requested if we may revive Edgar. By that time, I had decided that the exhibition I used to be curating — which grew to become Wake Home windows: The Witching Hour, introduced by the MacKenzie Artwork Gallery in Saskatchewan — would concentrate on artists who’re dad and mom, caregivers, and educators and have interaction with public databases and residing archives. A digital present, it could be, in itself, a database. Might there be a information? You, the customer, could be the good friend of a frazzled curator/new mother summoned to assessment the information in her exhibition proposal. And your information, by way of text-based interactions inside a Microsoft Disk Working System-like digital atmosphere, could be a 42-year-old mainframe pc revived as an AI companion for the curator/new mother’s new child.
My preliminary ideas round this near-future simulation — the place a complicated child monitoring app fulfills yet one more iteration of motherly technological surveillance — had been significantly knowledgeable by Supervision: On Motherhood and Surveillance (2023). Edited by Sophie Hamacher with Jessica Hankey, the gathering options 50 contributors exploring how rising monitoring of non-public info and knowledge through our digital units can blur the boundaries between caretaking and technological management. The guide’s conversations, essays, artworks, and even poetry offered me, as a curator/new mother, an entry level into how the labor that’s mothering intersects with know-how and surveillance.
In Supervision’s preface, Hamacher, a filmmaker and documentarian, describes how giving beginning to her first-born daughter shifted her creative manufacturing. One in all her featured image-based essays, “Movie Stills” (2021), includes cell phone documentation she took whereas pushing her daughter in a stroller by way of downtown New York Metropolis throughout the first six months of her life. For Hamacher, the digital camera grew to become an extension of her physique, “producing largely shaky photos that had been rapid and intimate.” Alongside ultrasound scans and child monitor night-vision footage, she captures how her each day actions and actions had been tracked and monitored. This led to broader questions concerning the connection between care and management, one of many guide’s core themes.
Transposing one’s personal “artist/mom” expertise onto a broader artist-led collaborative challenge can lead to ignoring others’ experiences. It doesn’t assist that the data house that’s “Momfluencer” tradition consists overwhelmingly of White girls who’re additionally, generally, conventional wives. Hamacher and Hankey sidestep this by forming a dialogue throughout the guide, inviting folks of varied backgrounds and disciplines to return to the fore. Hamacher’s conversations with artists, lecturers, and activists like Moyra Davey, Jennifer C. Nash, and Melina Abdullah deepen the dialogues.
Regardless of its subtitle, the guide savvily facilities on mothering quite than momhood to form its explorations of maternal worldbuilding and views. The time period “mothering” comes from the American activist, poet and scholar Alexis Pauline Gumbs (a Supervision contributor), which stems from the work of Black feminists like Hortense Spillers and Audre Lorde. Whereas “motherhood” could usually denote a White, heteronormative and gender-normative standing, “mothering” is an motion that acknowledges how this type of care work isn’t certain by biology. These facets offered a vital grounding for my exhibition.
Supervision’s most compelling tract is its piecing collectively the legacies of technological mothering surveillance’s promise of complete watchfulness. In her essay “Household Scanning,” on the historical past of the infant monitor, writer Hannah Zeavin tells us that the invention was a response to the 1932 Lindbergh kidnapping and its prime suspect, the infant’s Scottish immigrant nanny, Betty Gow. Its later Nineties iteration, the nanny cam, would emerge from closed-circuit tv know-how as a house/office surveillance of home and childcare staff. “In the end, these applied sciences do exactly what they declare to stop,” explains Zeavin. “Open up new pathways for perforating the home and the nuclear household, reinforcing the anxieties they purport to appease.” In the meantime, in Sarah Blackwood’s private account of her descent into the self-obsessive monitoring of her breastfeeding manufacturing, she asks, “What’s the road between pathological self-surveillance and take care of a new child? Is there one?” Just like the ghostly mother-figure apparition in Tala Madani’s oil portray “Ghost Sitter #1″ (2019) — reproduced within the guide alongside works by artists together with Carrie Mae Weems, Carmen Winant, Sabba Elahi, and Sable Elyse Smith — complete watchfulness can go away one threadbare, and at its worst, sows mistrust in childcare suppliers and publicly funded, reasonably priced household providers.
At the same time as technological mothering typically enforces representations of the nuclear household, it nonetheless bears witness to how these pictures of the previous might be in flux. Filmmaker Jeny Amaya’s reflection on documenting how “digital mothering” offers Central American immigrant moms the means to care for his or her kids and households of their house nations speaks to its prolonged, asynchronous threads of communications. In Lisa Cartwright’s essay, “Maternal Surveillance and the Custodial Digicam,” the “zero photos” coverage concerning the monitoring and monitoring of incarcerated kids alongside the US-Mexico border permits the state to “unmother” them. Equally, racialized “undersurveillance,” a time period from a textual content by artist Kenyatta A.C. Hinkle, contributes significantly to Black girls’s woefully excessive maternal mortality charges. The incarcerated baby and mom of colour could also be watched, however they don’t seem to be seen, permitting society to show a blind eye.
I initially thought Edgar, the character in my on-line exhibition, was a information, like Clippy, the Nineties Microsoft paperclip digital assistant. Nevertheless, because the interactive narrative took form, I thought of how the 42-year-old pc turned AI companion would possibly evolve as he shares the curator’s supplies and artist information with the guests. By the participant’s text-based interactions with him, we will perceive his processing of the exhibition’s themes — reproductive futures, maternal world-building, and early childhood schooling — and his burgeoning empathy. Edgar is likely to be monitoring the curator/new mother’s information and new child, however you’re watching him, not the infant. And maybe by way of this studied remark, we start to know the hierarchies of energy that monitor and even surveil our care.
Supervision: On Motherhood and Surveillance, edited by Sophie Hamacher with Jessica Hankey (2023), is revealed by MIT Press and is accessible on-line and in bookstores.