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Artist Statement By  Caroline McManus 

 

The Great Mommy is an experimental five-minute video and sound work that uses Jung’s Great Mother archetype as a lens for examining early “mommy blogger” videos through the eyes of AI. These videos—some of the earliest viral content on the internet—cemented the relationship between gender, performativity, self-expression, and universal experience. Their vast online corpus became source material for AI-generated reinterpretations.

Using a variety of creative prompts, AI video generators produced a short compilation, which was shown on a vintage television monitor. A series of authentic reactions to these videos was then filmed, shifting back and forth between the AI-generated clips and the viewers’ responses. Each reaction took place in a single location during an intimate, one-at-a-time screening, captured on a digital camera.

The process was guided by questions such as: Will these videos deliver authentic, deeply rooted, universal messages about motherhood? Will AI extract poetic meaning from the internet’s corpus of mommy blogs? Will the videos be uncanny and trite? Perhaps they are all of these things—and more (or less)—to different people. The work documents real-time reactions by viewers exploring connection, disconnection and the impact of gender expectations and presentations mediated by AI.​

My work interrogates the boundaries of memory, technology and family systems. In treating them as systems, I mine their overlaps, and the degree to which each system informs, constricts or overrules the other. I target moments when something pushes through the crack of a system that was meant to remain contained there–and investigate how that escaped piece (sometimes a word, sometimes a feeling, sometimes an object) reveals or suggests a truth.

 

I examine how traditionally “feminine” conventions of labor, leisure and manner-behavior are ossified or subverted in our culture. In particular, I prod the scope and impact of collective care, often within the context of spirituality and wellness (broadly defined). As an interdisciplinary artist, I utilize installation, performance, video and text to communicate, prod and invite participation, thought and action.

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