UC San Diego’s Mandeville Art Gallery opens “Bodily Autonomy,” Lauren Lee McCarthy’s largest solo show in the U.S. to date. Curator Ceci Moss brings together two major series of works—Surrogate (2022) and Saliva (2022)—in which the Chinese-American artist examines bio-surveillance through performances, videos, and installations. A newly commissioned Saliva Bar, for example, invites visitors to reflect on data privacy, race, gender, and class as they pertain to genetic material over traded spit samples.

For MIT Technology Review. Cassandra Willyard surveys the state of rapidly advancing artificial womb research. As a promising prototype nears readiness for trials with human embryos, researchers and bioethicists are weighing potential implications on child-rearing. “The most challenging question to answer is how much unknown is acceptable,” says FDA neonatologist An Massaro to Willyard, of concerns that include gauging risk for premature infants and shifting discourse about a woman’s right to choose.

“What Models Make Worlds: Critical Imaginaries of AI” opens at New York’s Ford Foundation Gallery. Curators Mashinka Firunts Hakopian and Meldia Yesayan enlist 16 artists including Algorithmic Justice League, Morehshin Allahyari, Kite, Lauren Lee McCarthy, Mimi Ọnụọha, and Caroline Sinders to counter pervasive “algorithmic worldmaking” models with “feminist, antiracist, and decolonial AI.” Allahyari’s series Moon-faced (2022, image), for example, hallucinates genderless Qajar dynasty portraits.

American artist Aay Liparato‘s “Small Acts of Violence,” an exhibition surveying intimate partner violence (IPV) fallout in VR, opens at ARGOS Brussels. Co-producers C0N10UR and V2_ Lab for the Unstable Media join in presenting the immersive piece, which centres testimonials from women, nonbinary, and non-cis male IPV perpetrators from the UK and Belgium. Emotionally challenging, viewers must choose which situations to “gaze on or turn away from” and “assert their boundaries.”

A retrospective of the feminist performance artist in her native France, “ORLAN Manifesto. Body and Sculpture” opens at Les Abattoirs in Toulouse. Collecting 100+ works from ORLAN’s archives, the show links 1960-70s photography and performance, the iconic cosmetic surgeries (image: 7th Surgery-Performance called Omnipresence, 1993), to works in bioart and robotics, underscoring how her practice “opposes morality, natural and social determinisms, and all forms of domination.”

Lauren Lee McCarthy’s latest interactive performance Womb Walk premieres as part of her Surrogate installation at IDFA DocLab, the Amsterdam documentary film festival’s new media program. As the American artist strolls the city wearing a prosthetic belly (image), participants ‘become’ McCarthy’s baby. “You control my movements by triggering small internal kicks to the sides of my belly directing me when to turn,” she writes on Instagram. “Together, we navigate the city, with imagined baby as interface.”