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Mother Cyborg, a young Latin woman with shoulder-length black hair, poses in front of a colorful street wall in cyborg-like white shades, a black sleeveless T-shirt, and neon colored printed arm bands.

Portrait photo by Trilogy Beats.

Artists

Mother Cyborg

She // Her // Hers

Artist, Educator, and Tech Organizer

Detroit, Michigan

Mother Cyborg is a multimedia artist who uses music, performance, DIY publishing, quilting, and popular education to elevate collective technological consciousness and agency. At the age of eight, she taught herself piano and cello. At twenty-four, her cello performances using a custom program to abstract videos of thunderstorms and sunrises with frequency and volume left audiences in tears. She then realized the power art, media, and technology have in facilitating collective emotional experiences.

Mother Cyborg weaves together education, technology and craft to create evidence of mutual aid and reveal the curiosity between individual people with each other, with technology, and with the natural world. Pressure Systems, her debut album released in 2017, is an opus to self-transformation that tells the story of a cyborg coming to consciousness. Mother Cyborg's art draws from and includes thirteen years of community organizing work in Detroit, Michigan, during which time she wrote guides and devised organizing models to fight digital redlining by teaching residents in low-income neighborhoods to build and run their own Internet Service Providers. Her seventeen zines, which include The Teaching Community Technology Handbook and A People's Guide to AI, document and disseminate community technology practices.

Donor -This USA Fellowship was generously supported by the USA Endowment Fund. The Knight Arts + Tech Fellowship is supported by the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation.

This artist page was last updated on: 07.31.2024

Media
Four young women watch an elder Black woman DJing with vinyl records. The DJ has headphones on and drops the needle onto a record.

Documentation of Beat Match Brunch by Mother Cyborg, 2017 – present. A community-building and music program for women to learn to DJ with vinyl records.

A rectangular fabric quilt made up of triangles and squares of varying sizes and intricate textured patterns. Larger stacked turquoise triangles on the left and right sides and hot pink triangles on the top and bottom surround the number “404” in orange fabric at center. Smaller purple, red, yellow, and orange triangles line the quilt in horizontal and vertical patterns.

Mestizos404 from "404 Quilts" series by Mother Cyborg, 2020. Quilt, 86 × 93 inches.

Photo by Ara Howrani; courtesy of the artist.

A square fabric quilt made up of four large orange diamonds in an “X” shape with a blue diamond in the center against a bright yellow background with a satin blue border. At center, a curtain of shiny and translucent pink sequins obscures a jumbled code of light pink letters and numbers underneath. At top left, light pink letters form the words “Begin PGP Message,” and at bottom left they read “End PGP Message.”

Encrypt Me Quilt from "Digital Security Blanket" series by Mother Cyborg, 2020. Quilt, 36 × 36 inches.

Photo by Ara Howrani; courtesy of the artist.

A rectangular fabric quilt made up of a stacked hexagonal pattern, forming a three-dimensional cubic illusion with eight rows of richly textured light blue, orange, and light green patterned diamonds. Around the edges runs a hot pink border and a satin blue border.

Boxed Behavior from "Digital Security Blanket" series by Mother Cyborg, 2021. Quilt, 72 × 58 inches.

Photo by Ara Howrani; courtesy of the artist.