Nancy Baker Cahill - Motherboard

Over the summer of 2021, Oxy Arts launched "Encoding Futures: Speculative Monuments for L.A.", a remote summer residency program. Over a 3-month period, artists Nancy Baker-Cahill, Audrey Chan, Joel Garcia with Meztli Projects and Patrick Martinez researched and developed original virtual monuments to be geo-located at sites across Los Angeles. The monuments are accessible for the public to view through the 4th Wall app.
The prompt for the residency was to conceive a blueprint for a site-specific imagined future, and consider technologically enabled transformations that might shape the future of the site.
Nancy Baker Cahill created Motherboard. Motherboard floats above Los Angeles City Hall, proposing a newly imagined de-centralized system of governance that supports kinship, equity, and community care. Nancy Baker Cahill was inspired by the motherboards found in computers, and began imagining what an improved, de-centralized system for our city could look like using future technologies. Because the motherboard acts as the spine of the computer, she researched the human spine, and pondered what it means for leadership to have a spine, or conversely to be spineless. Radiating out from the spine are arterial networks that resemble mycelial mycorrhizal networks- highly efficient threads that connect individual plants together to transfer water, nitrogen, carbon, and even life sustaining information. The artwork resembles an abstract butterfly, lightly flapping its wings above the city as an echo of the butterfly effect's potential for positive systemic change. This movement is a gesture of embrace, speaking to Cahill’s desire to expand upon what is culturally ascribed to mothering-nurturing and care-in a degendered form.
Learn more at www.oxy.edu/oxy-arts/current-...