Astronaut Floating In Dark Space
2020

A performanc installation in which a mother figure and a machine baby inside an artificial uterus form a symbiotic loop through synchronized breathing and visual tracking, redefining motherhood within an engineered system of maintenance.



Astronaut floating in dark space stages a reproductive theater that moves between installation and performance, built around an artificial uterus. A translucent membrane is constructed as the uterus itself, an external gestational chamber that suspends a “machine baby” in darkness, sustained as if within an engineered life-support environment. A female performer enters as the mother and negotiates intimacy with a pregnancy displaced from the body into an apparatus. Through touch, proximity, waiting, and care, motherhood shifts from sentiment into visible technical labor: maintaining, regulating, feeding, enduring.

The work draws from Suki Finn’s two metaphysical models of pregnancy. In the birth model, the fetus is part of the maternal body, like an organ. In the culturally dominant container model, fetus and mother are two distinct entities. Finn also offers the image of the fetus as an astronaut floating in dark space rather than embedded in the uterine wall. Here, that astronaut is replaced by a machine, and the “space” it drifts through is an engineered uterus. Gestation no longer belongs to an interior body; it becomes an environmental condition. The artificial uterus turns reproduction into a designed, deployable, replaceable structure, loosening the boundary between “child” and “device.”

The machine acquires vision and responds through tracking, not as emotion but as protocol. The breathing does not belong to the uterus. It belongs to the machine baby itself. Air bladders embedded in its body inflate and deflate with the mother’s rhythm and contact, translating her presence into synthetic respiration. Care becomes a feedback system, and intimacy becomes an exchange of signals across a membrane. The performance culminates in a cesarean section: a surgical incision into the artificial uterus to extract the machine baby. The gesture reads as birth and as breach, as tenderness and as procedure. By foregrounding the replaceability of the artificial uterus and the externalization of gestation, the work collapses the difference between child and machine, and eventually the difference between us and the machine. Its conclusion is blunt and speculative: we will have to use machines, and we will have to become each other.

Soft:
-OpenCV for Processing
-Arduino IDE

Hard:
-4-axis robotic arm
-PIR Sensor
-Air Pump
-Silicon Membrane
-custom-made plastic inflatable bladders


 

                                                                                                                                              © 2026 — AUTONOMOUS SYSTEM