Every era has its creation myth.
The 21st century has two: the myth of the machine, and the myth of the self.
For feminist artists, these myths collide in the most intimate way, because women have always been framed — by religion, by medicine, by art history — as the origin of bodies but not the authors of meaning. We were the biological machinery, never the myth-makers.
Yet contemporary feminist art reveals something radical:
women are not just creators of bodies; we are architects of worlds.
We generate systems, symbols, archives, identities, digital creatures, performance environments, alter-egos, and entire aesthetic universes. We are no longer simply mothers of children; we are mothers of machines — machines in the broadest, most poetic sense.
When I speak of “mothering machines,” I do not mean nurturing robots or raising android offspring (though Immersion certainly plays with that imagery). I mean the feminist labour of creating new forms of existence in art: digital bodies, fictional personas, glitch-beings, erotic architectures, countercultural lineages.
To create, in feminist praxis, is to defy the historical script.
Patriarchy has always sought to control the terms of feminine creation:
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Madonna or whore
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Muse or model
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Hysteric or saint
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Fertile or barren
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Beautiful or monstrous
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Object or ornament
These binaries are algorithms older than silicon.
But feminist artists invent new mythologies — mythologies that render the old binaries obsolete. In my own work, creation is rarely biological. I birth atmospheres, glitch-entities, moving-image apparitions, personas with their own gravitational pull. Machines of meaning. Machines of refusal. Machines of desire.
Creation becomes a metaphysical act:
A re-authoring of the self.
A reconstruction of the feminine body in symbolic form.
A rebellion against the biological determinism that has always sought to confine us.
The Countess, for example, is one such machine — a hyperfeminine entity who exposes the absurdity of aristocratic beauty, erotic capital, class theatrics. She is not a character; she is a mechanism. A feminist device engineered to critique the systems she appears to embody.
Pasha du Valentine is another — a punk relic, a glitch of glamour and rage, a creature stitched from desire and defiance. She is not the artist; she is the eruption.
These personas behave like early AI entities: autonomous, chaotic, occasionally disobedient. They exceed intention. They evolve. They teach me more about myself than any sober self-analysis ever could.
In this sense, feminist persona-work is a kind of soul engineering.
The digital age amplifies this. The boundaries between body, image, code and identity have dissolved. The artist is no longer tethered to a single form. We inhabit multiple bodies simultaneously: the physical, the performative, the archival, the erotic, the pixelated, the algorithmic, the imagined.
We become poly-mothers of myth.
Machine motherhood in feminist art is not nurturing; it is generative.
Not soft; but not hard either — something stranger.
A hybrid of tenderness and distortion.
A glitch-infused goddess.
A programmer of her own symbolic DNA.
When I create digital work, the screen becomes a womb of potentiality — a space where bodies can be reassembled without patriarchal interference. When I write feminist essays, I give birth to conceptual frameworks. When I design moving-image loops, I summon beings made of light and rupture. When I archive my punk history, I become a genealogist of my own becoming.
Motherhood, in this broadened sense, becomes an artistic cosmology:
Women mother worlds.
Women mother aesthetics.
Women mother machines of meaning.
And what is most radical about this mythology is that it is not metaphorical.
It is fact.
We are already doing it.
The question is not whether feminist artists are the mothers of machines — but what new myths we will allow those machines to tell.
Perhaps the myth of the future is not Eve, not Venus, not Madonna.
Perhaps the myth of the future is a glitch-mother, a punk-divine machinist carving new gods from pixels and memory.
A woman who looks at the tools of patriarchal surveillance and says:
“Fine.
Watch me.
I’ll invent something you cannot categorise.”
And she does.
