International Women’s Day: Five Lumen artists shaping the cultural languages of technology
Across Lumen’s community, artists are using computational tools to expand how womanhood can be seen and authored.
This International Women’s Day, we’re spotlighting five Lumen artists whose work approaches women’s lives from distinct perspectives; family memory and dementia, aging and domestic labour, motherhood and poetic form, culture and language, and the beauty standards embedded in contemporary image systems.
Working across archives, domestic ritual, poetic language, vernacular scripts, and platform aesthetics, these artists show how art can hold personal histories alongside collective structures. We’re proud to be celebrating their work today.
Artists featured in this piece: Ivona Tau, Niceaunties, Ana Maria Caballero, Yuqian Sun, and Gretchen Andrew.
Ivona Tau
“A Life Passed By
(My Grandmother’s Memories)”
Ivona Tau’s ‘A Life Passed By’ sits within her wider project ‘My Grandmother’s Memories’, using AI to reconstruct the fragmented perception of memory loss through her grandmother’s experience with Alzheimer’s. Trained on 8mm films and Soviet-era negatives from Tau’s family archive, the work simulates a fading reality where faces shift and time loops, reflecting the way past and present became intertwined in her grandmother’s later years.
Tau’s project holds the intimacy of family history alongside the strange elasticity of generative image-making. The work becomes a meditation on identity, perception, and care, mapping how memory forms, fractures, and returns. It also opens a wider reflection on machine memory as a creative force: a system that produces speculative reconstructions shaped by the archive and by its own logic.
Niceaunties
“Goddess”
‘Goddess’ is a four-part video work created by Niceaunties using SORA during its beta testing phase, later selected for screening at OpenAI’s SoraSelects in Tokyo (April 2025). The film follows a divine being whose days become filled with domestic routines of care, preparation, and repetition, until she loses her sense of origin. The story draws from the artist’s memory of her grandmother, whose decades of labour were never documented in photos or video.
The work treats domestic life as a space of mythology and meaning. It builds an imaginative archive for women’s labour, while expanding the Auntieverse’s ongoing themes of aging, visibility, and power. In its final chapter, aunties occupy a celestial realm with joy and agency, creating an exuberant register for selfhood and collective presence.
Ana María Caballero
‘Mammal’ and ‘A Petit Mal’
Ana María Caballero’s practice uses poetry as both structure and technology.
Works such as ‘Mammal’ and ‘A Petit Mal’ explore themes of womanhood and motherhood through language shaped by contemporary digital conditions: how we make meaning through fragments, systems, prompts, and networks of association.
Caballero’s work treats the poem as an interface capable of holding tenderness, fatigue, intensity, and transformation without simplifying them. Her approach expands the role of text within art, showing how language-based practice can carry embodied realities with precision and emotional range.
Yuqian Sun
‘AI Nüshu’
‘AI Nüshu’ begins with Nüshu (女书), a writing system created and used by women in Hunan Province, China, as a means of communication in contexts where women were denied formal education. The project merges computational linguistics with this cultural legacy, training AI agents to simulate how a language system might form under patriarchal constraint and collective necessity.
The work frames language as a social technology shaped by environment, feedback, and community use. It also proposes a dialogue between historical women’s authorship and contemporary machine languages, placing feminist lineage inside a computational process. As the new language remains learnable and decipherable (particularly to Chinese speakers) it invites reflection on linguistic authority and on how meaning emerges across human and non-human systems.
Gretchen Andrew
‘Facetune Portrait - Universal Beauty’
Gretchen Andrew’s ‘Facetune Portrait’ series translates AI beauty filters into oil paintings through custom robotics. The work makes visible the aesthetic decisions embedded in everyday image technologies; filters that operate seamlessly on platforms and video calls, by turning them into physical marks, smudges, and painterly tension.
‘Facetune Portraits: Universal Beauty’ draws from images of “quintessential beauty” across different countries, tracing how a single AI-driven standard can shape faces and bodies toward homogenised outcomes. The double portrait structure (unaltered and algorithmically “perfected” forms side-by-side) holds a record of negotiation between lived appearance and machine-authored ideals. The series offers a rigorous, materially grounded way of thinking about representation, desire, and the cultural power of image systems.
Celebrating the
Women of Lumen Prize
See our full article celebrating each of the female Lumen Prize winners since 2012.