Now in its third iteration, The Rise of the Care Machines is an exhibition that centers the practices of new media artists who are also mothers—but whose creative identities are not defined by motherhood alone. These artists work across virtual reality, augmented reality, video, web-based interaction, and installation, refusing the binaries of care/code, labor/play, and glitch/intimacy. Their work challenges the separation of caregiving and creation, revealing the deeply interwoven nature of these processes.
Rather than framing motherhood as subject matter, this exhibition foregrounds the heavy-duty yet often invisible labor of care embedded within digital practice. It highlights the complex lives and hybrid practices of artists who mother while they make—feeding, uploading, editing, patching, nurturing, and building. Within The Rise of the Care Machine III, care is not a metaphor, but a method: persistent, powerful, and rising beneath the surface.
Each artist will contribute either a new or existing work that reflects their hybrid practices of digital media and lived caregiving.
In conjunction with the exhibition, a public panel discussion will be held featuring participating artists and confirmed guest speaker from UMD’s School of Public Health: the director of the University of Maryland Prevention Research Center, Dr. Elizabeth Aparicio will discuss their NIH-funded maternal health chatbot project and its intersection with the exhibition’s themes of digital care, technology, and invisible labor. This conversation will bridge theoretical, artistic, and applied perspectives on care in both virtual and real-world contexts.