MotherHack: Creative coding as an artist-mother

Abstract

Enmeshed in the materiality of caregiving, becoming a mother changes how one relates to the world and others. These changes involve how a mother as subject is defined by others through cultural and societal idealizations of motherhood and parenting norms, but also through the leaking boundaries between the mother and other subjects as she is attuned to the needs of caregiving. In this analysis, I consider maternal subjectivity in terms of working as an artist-mother, defined as an artist who is also a mother and whose practice does not distinguish between these roles. In particular, I focus on the process of my development of a creative coding project, Emergent, during the COVID-19 pandemic. Through this analysis of the process of developing Emergent, I attend to the questions of maternal subjectivity that arose through its production, drawing from the embodied experiences of working as an artist-mother, in order to understand maternal subjectivity through the practice of computation. Here the work of producing art becomes the means of considering maternal subjectivity differently through embodied experience, as the labor affiliated with care-giving is entangled with the process of art making.