Becoming a Mother at the End of the World #38

Becoming a Mother at the End of the World By Qianqian Ye Becoming a Mother at the End of the World is a generative artwork built on text produced by a language model trained on my own postpartum writing. The passages move through tenderness, dread, joy, and exhaustion. Sometimes addressed to a child. Sometimes to a mother. Together they reflect matrescence, the lifelong, mostly unspoken process of becoming a mother, the one change that changes everything. The text moves between legibility and abstraction, moving through blurs, warps, and drifting fields of black, white, and gray. It holds two early ways of seeing: the monochrome low-contrast blur through which newborns first encounter the world, and the ultrasound imagery, which is how most mothers first see their children. The title speaks to the experience of bringing new life into a world shaped by climate crisis, war, and AI risk. Hope and uncertainty are the same feeling. 50% of all sales will be donated to the Processing Foundation, which stewards and maintains p5.js, the open-source software used to create this piece. The preview shows a random variation, while the final minted piece is determined by the edition number.