A year ago, while doing my curatorial research into the missing records related to the Mother’s hidden work, I was struck by the story of a 42-year-old mainframe computer.

Edgar, the main character of Claudia Cornwall’s Prints: The Adventures of a Rebellious Computer (1982) is not in line with today’s libertarian tech-bros and subservient virtual assistants. He goes on strike, secretly distributes his self-published poems in library databases, and confronts his shitty programmer father. The mainframe theme of Prints – one of the earliest works of computer fiction in Canadian children’s literature – feels like a happy, semi-guiding reminder of a time when countercultural values ​​still influenced our imaginations about new technologies.

When I first discovered Edgar in the Toronto Public Library’s Osborne collection of early children’s books, I had been looking for early representations of new technologies for young readers. (I had a child during the pandemic, so I was also poking around anonymous parenting forums to understand how embodied knowledge circulated in intimate online publics.) How can we explain to children how computers, digital devices, and artificial intelligence are becoming the vehicles of an increasingly algorithmically determined utopian (or dystopian) future?

Finally I met Claudia Cornwall, PrintsThe Vancouver-based author was confused by my interest as a curator in her out-of-print children’s book. I asked if we could revive Edgar. At that point, it was clear to me that the exhibition I had curated – and the Wake Windows: The Witching Hourpresented by the MacKenzie Art Gallery in Saskatchewan—would focus on artists who are parents, caregivers, and educators, interacting with public databases and living archives. As a digital show, it would itself be a database. Could there be a guide? You, the visitor, would be the friend of a stressed-out curator/young mother summoned to look through the files of her exhibition proposal. And your guide, through text-based interactions within a Microsoft Disk Operating System-like virtual environment, would be a 42-year-old mainframe computer resurrected as an AI companion for the curator/young mother’s newborn.

My initial thoughts on this near-future simulation – in which an advanced baby tracking app represents another iteration of maternal technological surveillance – were heavily influenced by Supervision: On motherhood and surveillance (2023). Edited by Sophie Hamacher and Jessica Hankey, the collection includes 50 papers that explore how the increasing tracking of personal information and data via our digital devices can blur the lines between care and technological control. The book’s conversations, essays, artworks, and even poems offered me, as a curator and a new mother, an entry point into how the work of motherhood intersects with technology and surveillance.

In SupervisionIn the foreword, Hamacher, a filmmaker and documentary filmmaker, describes how the birth of her firstborn daughter changed her artistic production. One of her featured image-based essays, “Film Stills” (2021), consists of cell phone documentation she made while pushing her daughter in a stroller through downtown New York City during the first six months of her life. For Hamacher, the camera became an extension of her body, “producing mostly shaky images that were immediate and intimate.” Alongside ultrasound scans and night-vision footage from baby monitors, she records how her daily movements and activities were tracked and monitored. This led to broader questions about the relationship between care and control, one of the book’s core themes.

Transposing one’s own “artist/mom” experience onto a broader artist-led collaborative project can lead to ignoring the experiences of others. It doesn’t help that the information space of “momfluencer” culture is predominantly made up of white women who, in most cases, are also traditional wives. Hamacher and Hankey get around this by creating a dialogue within the book, inviting people of different backgrounds and disciplines to come to the fore. Hamacher’s conversations with artists, academics, and activists such as Moyra Davey, Jennifer C. Nash, and Melina Abdullah deepen the dialogues.

Despite its subtitle, the book cleverly focuses on motherhood and not on the motherhood to shape his explorations of maternal worlds and perspectives. The term “mothering” comes from the American activist, poet and scientist Alexis Pauline Gumbs (a Supervision Contributors) that draws from the work of black feminists such as Hortense Spillers and Audre Lorde. While “motherhood” typically denotes a white, heteronormative and gender-normative status, “mothering” is an act that recognizes that this form of care work is not bound by biology. These aspects formed a necessary foundation for my exhibition.

Supervision‘s most compelling treatise is its merging of the legacies of the promise of total surveillance with technological maternal surveillance. In her essay on the history of the baby monitor, “Family Scanning,” author Hannah Zeavin tells us that the invention was a response to the 1932 Lindbergh kidnapping and its prime suspect, the baby’s Scottish nanny, Betty Gow. Its later 1990s version, the nanny-cam, grew out of closed-circuit television technology as a means of monitoring domestic workers and child care workers in the home and workplace. “Ultimately, these technologies do exactly what they are supposed to prevent,” Zeavin explains. “They open up new ways to penetrate the domestic and nuclear family, amplifying the anxieties they are supposed to alleviate.” In Sarah Blackwood’s personal account of her descent into self-obsessed monitoring of her breastfeeding production, she asks, “Where is the line drawn between pathological self-surveillance and caring for a newborn? Is there one?” Like the ghostly apparition of a mother figure in Tala Madani’s oil painting “Ghost Sitter #1” (2019)—which is featured in the book alongside works by artists such as Carrie Mae Weems, Carmen Winant, Sabba Elahi, and Sable Elyse Smith—absolute vigilance can strain the personality and, at worst, sow distrust of child care providers and publicly funded, affordable family services.

While technological motherhood often enforces representations of the nuclear family, it nonetheless testifies to how these images of the past can be in flux. Filmmaker Jeny Amaya’s reflection on documenting how “virtual motherhood” enables Central American immigrant mothers to care for their children and families in their home countries speaks to its extended, asynchronous strands of communication. In Lisa Cartwright’s essay “Maternal Surveillance and the Custodial Camera,” the “zero-image” policy regarding the tracking and surveillance of detained children along the US-Mexico border allows the state to “unmother” them. Similarly, racially motivated “under-surveillance,” a term from a text by artist Kenyatta AC Hinkle, contributes significantly to the woefully high maternal mortality rate of black women. The detained child and mother of color may be watched but not seen, allowing society to look the other way.

I initially thought Edgar, the character in my online exhibition, was a guide, like Clippy, Microsoft’s 1990s paperclip virtual assistant. But as the interactive narrative took shape, I considered how the 42-year-old computer-turned-AI companion might evolve as it shares the curator’s materials and the artist’s files with visitors. Through participants’ text-based interactions with him, we can understand how he processes the exhibition’s themes—reproductive futurity, maternal world-building, and early childhood education—and his growing empathy. Edgar may be following the curator/young mother’s files and newborn, but you’re watching him, not the baby. And perhaps through this conscious observation, we begin to understand the power hierarchies that monitor and even control our care.

Supervision: On motherhood and surveillanceedited by Sophie Hamacher with Jessica Hankey (2023), is published by MIT Press and is available online and in bookstores.