Mother of Machines: Feminist Creation Myths in the Age of Artificial Bodies
Every era has its creation myth. The 21st century has two: the myth of the machine, and the myth of the self. For feminist artists, these myths collide in the most intimate way, because women have always been framed — by religion, by medicine, by art history — as the origin of bodies but not the authors of meaning. We were the biological machinery, never the myth-makers. Yet contemporary feminist art reveals something radical: women are not just creators of bodies; we are architects of worlds. We generate systems, symbols, archives, identities, digital creatures, performance environments, alter-egos, and entire aesthetic universes. We are no longer simply mothers of children; we are mothers of machines — machines in the broadest, most poetic sense. When I speak of “mothering machines,” I do not mean nurturing robots or raising android offspring (though Immersion certainly plays with that imagery). I mean the feminist labour of creating new forms of existence in art: digital...