Caretaking the Invisible: Data Motanka

Data Motanka is a digital art series reflecting on care, memory, and visibility in algorithm-driven culture. It consists of one central illustration and five symbolic portraits of traditional Slavic textile dolls (motanka) reimagined as carriers of encoded, feminine, and culturally embedded knowledge.

Each doll embodies a different aspect of digital entanglement: archiving, voice, neural logic, ritual connection, and ecological memory. Their embroidered aprons bear visual metaphors for microchips, waves, neural networks, or planetary code, merging soft textile traditions with the visual language of computation. Surrounding patterns subtly weave in Old Slavic scripts, evoking suppressed languages and erased knowledge systems.

Created as digital art (no AI), the series questions algorithmic authorship while thematically engaging with AI’s impact on cultural narratives. It reclaims ancestral visual codes as a feminist resistance to erasure and asking: what do we lose when machines decide what should be visible?

By centering women’s roles as unseen caretakers of both life and data, Data Motanka imagines a world where technology is not extractive, but reciprocal, where stories are not sorted, but honored.