Surrogate (2019) is a complex project that explores the entanglements of reproduction, technology and bodily autonomy. At its core is a series of projects that culminate into an interactive, one-woman performance that invites the audience into the intimate and unsettling experience of becoming a remotely controlled surrogate. Through this work, artist Lauren Lee McCarthy probes urgent questions about agency, consent, and control:
How much power should we hold over the bodies of those who give birth—and over a life before it even begins?
- Surrogate
- "Lauren Lee McCarthy: What is data?" (From exhibition: Data Relations)
- "Meet the Artist: Lauren Lee McCarthy on Surrogate" (Youtube video posted by Sundance)
- Surrogate Performance
- Womb Walk
"Shock Therapy" by Brian Droitcour -
"McCarthy Swaps Stories of Saliva and Surveillance by Renée Reizman -
"Lauren Lee McCarthy – Surrogate Performance" by Elise Krentzel -
"Lauren Lee McCarthy Confronts the Boundaries of Bio-Surveillance in New Exhibit" by Erika Johnson -
In a larger sense, Lauren Lee McCarthy’s work is a digital reflection on care, code, and control. Her artistic practice investigates the technological systems that increasingly shape and mediate our most intimate relationships, from parenting and health to self-monitoring and public exposure. Through a range of formats including performances, exhibitions, and speculative design, McCarthy creates immersive scenarios that challenge viewers to confront how emotional labor and bodily autonomy are reshaped by digital tools. The project is composed of several distinct pieces, such as Surrogate, Womb Walk, and What is Data?, each of which explores a different facet of how technology interacts with the body. Rather than offering solutions, McCarthy invites discomfort and reflection, revealing the quiet negotiations that occur when care is managed through systems of observation and control.
"The parents could decide what I eat, what I do, when I sleep — having complete control over the body in which their baby is growing."
Lauren Lee McCarthy’s Surrogate emerged during a moment of heightened public attention to reproductive autonomy (following legislation in the U.S. that actively worked to supress women's rights to reproductive healthcare), quantified bodies, and the increasing role of technology in care systems. Created between 2021 and 2022, the project unfolded alongside the ongoing pandemic, which forced a global reckoning with remote intimacy, medical surveillance, and digitally mediated care. At the same time, political shifts in the United States placed reproductive rights under renewed threat, making bodily autonomy not just a personal issue but a contested public battleground. Within this context, Surrogate becomes both speculative and immediate. McCarthy was responding to the growing presence of algorithmic governance in intimate spaces, from fertility tracking apps to health insurance algorithms, and asking what it means to entrust your most vulnerable experiences to systems built for efficiency and oversight rather than empathy. The project was not made for a generalized audience but instead for a public that is both implicated in and exhausted by the infrastructures of care. Viewers are asked to reflect not from a distance but from within — as people who are already monitored, already managing, already performing.
Visually, the project leans on a hybrid aesthetic that combines clinical minimalism with emotional intensity. The visual language of Surrogate includes medical forms, womb-like prosthetics, and app interfaces, creating a tension between cold utility and warm affect. This duality is central to the work’s critique. The pastel colors and rounded UI elements evoke trust and safety. At the same time, the control mechanisms such as behavioral instructions, emotional feedback prompts, and surveillance tools suggest constraint and domination. This contrast is intentional. McCarthy’s representational choices recall the aesthetics of health apps, wellness branding, and technology-driven maternal care, drawing from real design systems that feel familiar and comfortable. She reconfigures these elements to reveal the power structures beneath them. In doing so, she places her work within a broader lineage of feminist art, bio-art, and performance practices that treat the body as both subject and interface. The work invites us to question not only what we see but also how we are seen and what is expected of us in return.
However, at the advice and warning of medical professionals, McCarthy was prevented from following through with being a surrogate by the medical board, thus she opted into expanding her work through a series of short films, performances, and installations that tell the story of what happened.
"I walk the city with prosthetic belly, talking out loud to my virtual baby, describing everything I see. You remotely join the walk as baby, listening to my voice. You control my movements by triggering small internal kicks to the sides of my belly directing me when to turn. Together, we navigate the city, with imagined baby as interface."
In Womb Walk, McCarthy wears a prosthetic artificial womb in public space, slowly navigating through the city. The piece is tender and jarring — a maternal figure made hypervisible, her vulnerability both offered and shielded by the womb she carries. This gesture slows down time and demands space for care. The walk becomes protest — against speed, against invisibility, and against the lack of public infrastructure that supports real gestation, care, and bodily autonomy.
In the Sundance interview, McCarthy reflects on Surrogate as both a scripted performance and an improvisational experiment in care. She describes how she developed protocols — feeding, waking, watching — that turned her into a system of maternal logic.
Critics across several platforms responded strongly to McCarthy’s work. Brian Droitcour described Surrogate as “weaponizing empathy,” turning parental and health care into a tool that exposes systems of surveillance and overall reliance on technology. Renée Reizman focused on how intimate bodily exchanges — like saliva or proximity — become subversive under digital observation. Elise Krentzel emphasized how McCarthy’s own body becomes a performative site for collective motherhood. Further, Erika Johnson highlighted the collapse of distance in bio-surveillance — the watcher is now in the womb, in the home, in your walk.
Overall, the reception reveals that McCarthy’s goal was successful: she provoked discomfort, dialogue, and introspection. The projects didn’t just show us technology — they made us feel its effects on the most personal levels. Through emotional intensity and clinical structure, McCarthy accomplished something rare: she made the audience reflect on the intimacy we give away, and what it means to reclaim it.