MAMA
Cows are machines. Cows are also mothers. Mothers are cows. Mothers are machines.
This interactive sculpture reimagines La Pietà as a hybrid mother-cow-machine figure. The Virgin holds a milking device, her body altered with udders and bovine limbs. A screen displays the censored image of her that becomes clear as viewers pull a chain connected below. The metallic cradles holding six milk bottles, each collected from the artist’s daily life as symbolic children.
Speakers play lullabies sung by women worldwide. As the image clarifies, the lullabies grow louder and overlap into a maternal choir. A custom AI labels parts of the body in real time, while the viewer can manually make the cradles rock in sync with it’s action.
The concept of MAMA seeks to challenge and expand the definition of the cyborg proposed by Donna Haraway (1991), which often frames the cyborg as a mere combination of organic and inorganic forms. Instead, MAMA develops the artist’s self-defined existence as a cyborg. Within this framework, the cyborg is reimagined as a coherent trinity of human, nonhuman, and machine, unified through the figure of motherhood. This framework draws inspiration from Spinoza’s philosophy of immanence(1996), in which Deus sive Natura (“God or Nature”) affirms that all entities, whether organic, inorganic, human, or technological, are expressions of a single substance. Unlike the Christian conception of a transcendent God, Spinoza’s divinity is immanent within nature itself and emphasizes the interconnectedness of all existence. Building on this Spinozist vision, MAMA reconfigures the cyborg not as a fragmented or alienated being but as a maternal figure of generativity in which human, nonhuman, and machine converge in a shared ontological integration.
However, the narrative approach of MAMA is to create a sense of distance between human, nonhuman, and machine through a harsh and unsettling form of alienation. This is shown in the transformation of La Pietà into a hybrid figure, half woman and half cow, holding a milking machine as if it were her child, gently rocking to the sound of lullabies. The mother figure is also tracked and classified by a real-time machine learning model, which acts as a supposedly more accurate observer than human sight. In this way, computer vision is not only a technical tool but also a symbolic viewer that defines and reveals the “truth” of motherhood. The act of classification highlights how different images of the mother overlap: the religious icon of La Pietà, the dairy cow of industrial farming, the status of being mama, and the bodily signs of reproduction and feeding such as the breast, the udder, and the machine within a system shaped by industrial production.
Furthermore, building on Gilbert Simondon’s theories of individuation and automation(2017), the machine in this context is positioned as an individual rather than a passive tool. For Simondon, technical objects undergo a process of individuation in which they develop coherence, agency, and relationality within broader systems of human and nonhuman actors. In MAMA, the machine thus assumes a dual role. On the one hand, it operates within industrial production, where it reduces living beings to components of an economic apparatus, reinforcing alienation and harm through the logic of mass production. On the other hand, the machine also functions as a revelatory force, exposing the uncomfortable truths that human society attempts to conceal through labor and industrial processes. The lower half of the mother figure remains pixelated, responding to cultural practices of censorship in which the breast and the udder—organs fundamental to birth and nourishment—are marked as sensitive and excluded from public discourse. This act of concealment transforms motherhood into a construct of sexualization and alienation rather than a sacred or communal responsibility. The interactive element of the work further underscores this tension: as the audience pulls the chain, the more effort they exert, the clearer the image becomes, while releasing the chain allows the figure to return to its blurred state. This dynamic situates the viewer within the cycle of concealment and revelation, mirroring Simondon’s insight that machines not only participate in systems of production but also reshape the relations through which truth and meaning are perceived.
In response to theories of industrialized production, the cow is often regarded as a machine that consumes grass and produces milk. Within this same negative logic, the mother too is reduced to the status of a machine. Yet this reduction overlooks a crucial fact: cows themselves are mothers. The machine, in this context, does not merely dehumanize or de-animalize but also exposes this underlying truth, revealing the entanglement of motherhood, production, and mechanization.
