Jeremy Bailey and Kristen D. Schaffer
Preterna, 2017
Preterna is a pregnancy simulator that invites viewers to become a pre, pre parent by virtually inhabiting a pregnant body. Expanding from their augmented reality video work, The Future of Marriage (2013), which takes the promises of a post-gender digital world to an ironic extreme, Jeremy Bailey and Kristen D. Schaffer have proposed Preterna, the future of families. Responding to narratives of VR as an “empathy machine,” and taking advantage of the invention of self-learning, and intelligent computer software, they have created software that couples can carry to term, and eventually “raise” as a technologically superior alternative to having a baby. Through their vision of a future of families that transcend material constraints and labour, Jeremy Bailey and Kristen D. Schaffer satirize the utopian lifestyles often proselytized by guru tech innovators.