Introduction

Access to Assisted Reproductive Technologies (ARTs) has been radically 'codified' since the mid-2000s. Not only have legislating and lobbying efforts regulated national and local economies, but the immense proliferation of coded and networked entities that participate across these structures (digital code, the networked media and the interface) have effectively enabled a normalised model of family making to 'go viral'. This project considers the role of interfaces, screens, buttons, drop down lists, animated banners etc. in imagining and inscribing family- and network- building practices at large. It forms part of a wider research project focusing on reproductive control in the digital age, specifically the concurrent enclosing of both ARTs and the internet, since the 1990s.

How might the space of the interface be reclaimed as a site for both imagining and materialising alternative economies, ontologies and technologies of reproduction?

Replicating Tropes presents a snap shot of the tropes most commonly replicated in relation to family, gender, ability, emotion and desire across ART clinic and bank websites. The frequency is visualised in terms of font size. The sketch engages with a data set of 100 ART clinic and bank website homepages.

Networks of Care and Critique is a drawing program that invites participants to reconstruct their “networks of care and critique”, noting down a range of forms of support in a chronological order on a traditional genealogical tree format. In a context in which nation, family and home are being essentialised, it is vital to keep present the multiple parents, teachers, partners, activisms, poetry, theory and pedagogies that have nurtured our intellectual and physical lives.

The sonnet appeared in English in the early sixteenth century.