Lauren Lee McCarthy showed Surrogate during the pandemic at Sundance 2022 as an experimental web documentary and immersive performance. Here’s the synopsis: “To become a surrogate. I offer my body to carry someone else’s baby while they use an app to monitor and control me for nine months… As Roe v. Wade is overturned and gene editing opens entirely new reproductive futures, this project asks: How much control should we have over a birthing person’s body, and over a life before it’s born? What does kin mean when rapidly developing reproductive technologies—including IVF, egg and sperm donation, embryo freezing, DNA testing, and gene editing—shift our relationships? What happens when our industrialized drive for control collides with the process of birth?”

I interviewed McCarthy after the virtual Sundance screening of Surrogate in 2022 where we talked about her explorations of agency and surrender, and her history of other projects that blend the lines between virtual and physical. The medium of a web doc enabled McCarthy to break up her fragmented two-year journey of following these ideas to their logical extreme, to reflect upon the narrative themes that emerged, and then create an interactive live performance of a womb walk where she addresses the audience who virtually embody her unborn child as she walks through LA. The relationship between technology and humanity is a persistent theme in all of McCarthy's work, and this piece dives deep into the technologies involved in reproduction and is also a deeply personal journey exploring the potential of becoming a surrogate and the pushes the limits of control and agency in a speculative thought experiment that is documented across different media and represented through the format of an experimental web documentary.

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