SmartMom Rebooted: A Cyberfeminist Art Collective Reflects on its Earliest Work of Internet Art

subRosa, a cyberfeminist art and theory collective was organized as a reading group researching issues of feminism, science, embodiment, and technology. As part of a residency at Carnegie Mellon University’s “STUDIO for Creative Inquiry” subRosa members Faith Wilding and Hyla Willis collaborated to produce SmartMom our first interactive Web-based project about the rapidly developing new biotechnological/medical/reproductive field known as Assisted Reproductive Technologies (ART) and the increasing medical, technological, and state control of women’s bodies, sexuality, pregnancy, and birth. This illustrated essay describes the project’s origins, theory, research, and visual components, as well as its pedagogical and critical content, which examines the ways in which reproduction is being technologically managed increasingly linked to “smart” space and military technologies.

Just before the turn of the twenty first century -sometime around 1997 -a subRosa member went to buy a toaster at Kmart 1 and couldn't find one that was not "Smart." With some alarm, she noticed that all the other household appliances were likewise "smart," as were the toys in the toy department. Could this be a civilian trickle-down effect of the Internet or networked technologies of the First Gulf War? 2 (Figure 1).
Alongside articles about cyberfeminism and post-humanism, the cyberfeminist reading group from which the art collective subRosa hatched, had been investigating the new technologies of conception, pregnancy and childbirth known as Assisted Reproductive Technologies or ART, for example: fertility-enhancing drugs, intracytoplasmic sperm injection [ICSI], artificial insemination, in vitro fertilization [IVF], and surrogate gestation 3 . Most of us were students or faculty at Carnegie Mellon University, a campus specializing in science and robotics that helped develop the laser-guidance systems for "Smart Bombs" while simultaneously emerging as a recruiting ground for genetically superior egg donors. 4 This research inspired sR members Faith Wilding and Hyla Willis to create the SmartMom project as a satirical but critical, feminist response to the new reproductive technologies.

SmartMom (1999) is a détournement of the Defense Advanced Research Project
Agency's (DARPA) Smart T-Shirt technology, as well as being inspired by the proposed engineering of a cyborg body adapted for space travel, as described in Manfred Clynes and Nathan Cline's article Cyborgs and Space. 5 We hoped that our experimental NetArt project would later be expanded to include a performative sculptural installation making use of the actual high-tech fabric being developed at Georgia Tech, along with video monitors and audience participation. We were 1 Kmart is a US-based chain of large, mostly-suburban, discount department stores.  intrigued that the actual Smart T-Shirt material involved a matrix of piezoelectric sensors that might easily be used for experimental music making, among other forms of interactivity.
SmartMom proposes a civilian adaptation of the Smart T-Shirt as a means of surveilling and controlling the behavior of pregnant women and assuring a successful pregnancy. Originally engineered for remote battle-field wound-sensing, and to facilitate telepresent surgery for soldiers or space travelers, DARPA's Smart T-Shirt lent itself perfectly to subRosa's ironically imagined "repurposing," as a way to literally harness productive and reproductive female labor.
In a 2008 essay Common Knowledge and Political Love (iv), we discussed the sociopolitical context in which we created SmartMom and several later art projects, noting that "under capitalism, femininity and gender roles became a 'labor' function, and women became a 'labor class.' On one hand, women's bodies and labor are revered and exploited as a "natural" resource, a bio-commons or commonwealth fundamental to maintaining and continuing life, while women are also equated with "the lands," "mother-earth," or "the homelands." On the other hand, women's sexual and reproductive labor -motherhood, pregnancy, childbirth, housework, care-workis devalued economically and degraded socially." Women's bodies become flesh labs and Pharma-commons mined for eggs, embryonic tissues, and stem cells, and employed as gestational wombs in ART. Under such conditions, resistant feminist discourses of the "body" emerge as an explicitly biopolitical practice. 6 The SmartMom web site was an early experiment in tongue-in-cheek, discur- proposes a "solution" to the "problem" of women's notorious resistance to being controlled 7 (Figure 2): The SmartMom Mission: we're the company that cares for your complete pregnancy needs. We are dedicated to adapting women's reproductive bodies for robotic medical regulation and surveillance through cyborg technologies, SmartMom products, and remote reproductive management methods. globalized, with commissioning parents selecting eggs, sperm, IVF, gestation, nursing, and child rearing sources from multiple continents in the production of each child. This "global reproductive assembly line" is perfectly in sync with out-sourced capitalist production and marketing of many consumer goods and technologies.
ART has become both more available and more regulated in Europe (

Smart Pregnancy Regulation and Control Systems:
Women's intransigence and resistance to control-especially when under the irrational influence of powerful pregnancy hormones cannot be overestimated. For this reason the Smart Pregnancy dress surveillance system is augmented by an active regulating and control system, which allows the remote doctor to intervene tele-presently in the biological functions of the mother if s/he deems it necessary.
As activist feminist artists, subRosa is committed to continue to research and comment on new developments in feminist health and reproductive technologies, as well as to find ways to represent them critically, accurately, and artistically. Over the years we've experienced both a certain satisfaction when a project has stood the test of time, as well as deep concern and frustration when some of our predictions have become all too real--as we feel is the case with SmartMom and its continuing relevance both to contemporary feminist discourse, and the deplorable on-going neoliberal and fundamentalist battles about reproductive choice and women's bodies in the US. We despair that hard-won policies of reproductive "choice" for women, gay and transgender people are still embattled nationally, and that reproduction still demands great sacrifices and struggle in the lives and dreams of so many.

Author Information
subRosa is a cyberfeminist cell of cultural workers researching and producing texts, performances, and situational art-works, about women's lives, labor, and health, in the international circuit of knowledge and power. Hyla Willis and Faith Wilding are the current members of subRosa. Our projects and texts are available for free on www.cyberfeminism.net