Q+Art is a series featuring the artists behind our First Friday Exhibitions. Today, we’re talking with Santa Cruz-based artist Sarah Buckius, whose work is featured in our March 2026 exhibition, Out of Bounds: Pushing the Lines Between Technology and Art.
Caregiving, as new media artist Sarah Buckius describes it, is an act of improvisation. There’s no neat start or finish, just a series of moments, some tender, some chaotic, bleeding into one another. “Creative activities can be like this too,” she says, “except that often there is an end result—you create a thing.”
For someone with a background in mechanical engineering, like Sarah, that finished "thing" might be a new tool or piece of technology. She draws inspiration from women like Harriet Tracy and Mary Winter, whose nineteenth-century inventions—the chain-stitch sewing machine and the adding machine—shaped her own approach to making. But as a mother of three and a survivor of breast and uterine cancer, Sarah knows the logic of machines—tidy, efficient, outcome-driven—rarely maps neatly onto the reality of care. In her world, tending to others, inventing new tools, and navigating roles so often handed to women are tangled together, inseparable and inherently unresolved. “With caregiving, the wrangling might continue, but no real solution is found,” she says. “You definitely learn to sit with uncertainty forever.”
Sarah’s work lives in that ambiguity. Her practice spans animated films, interactive games, digital collages, and plush sculptures, each piece a patchwork of stories, stitched together from the overlooked stories, inventions, and creative labor of women. With projects like the animated film “!!! technoloffspring !!!” and the digital collage series “CAREbots,” she asks: What if technology grew out of the unpredictable, everyday work of care, rather than the cold logic of industry? Her work resists the forces of capitalism and patriarchy that seek to rationalize, commodify, and undervalue women’s labor and the very act of caregiving. “I have been accepting and amplifying contradictions [in my work] as a way to challenge notions of a clear, determinist, and inevitable technological process,” she explains.
Instead, Sarah’s art honors the “entangled constellation of caregiving,” illuminating the creative and technological labor of women past and present, and making space for mess, care, and contradiction in our visions of the future. Rather than smoothing away the mess, she puts it front and center, asking us to question the idea that technology—and progress itself—always moves in a straight, predictable line.
In Today’s Q+Art Interview…
Sarah Buckius opens up about her process, the politics and poetics of care, and why it’s imperative that “the voices of all types of people are part of [technology’s] inception and design.”
Your piece ‘!!! technoloffspring !!!’ is featured in the ‘Out of Bounds: Pushing the Lines Between Art and Technology’ exhibition. For those new to your work, how would you describe “!!! technoloffspring !!!,” and what inspired its creation?
Sarah Buckius: I think that several things came together when I conceived of the work. I have had many years of caregiving for my three kids (with intense years of feeding issues for my twins, who were born prematurely in a life-or-death birth for all three of us), and also my own experiences with breast and uterine cancer. Also, reflecting on my experiences as a mechanical engineer with hindsight, and researching the work of women in technology. Learning about the bias in technology landscapes (from conception to use—idea generation, design, manufacturing, use) that has traditionally undervalued and under-amplified the voices of women, I set out to uncover inventions by women from the late 1800s to early 1900s (the golden age of invention).
Much of your work explores the intersection of technology and womanhood, especially the experience of women in tech fields. How does your recent work, ‘Carebots,’ engage with these ideas?
SB: The carebots all amplify the inventions of women, point to biology and living beings, and suggest the possibility of a need to care for these “carebots”. Inspired by the experiences that I mentioned above, these works are amalgams of parts of patents by women (similar to techn00ffspring) but with different aesthetics. Both of these projects entail collage-like processes of bringing together fragments of parts of wholes to create a new whole. I just realized this is sort of similar to caregiving and to engineering! There is the process of gathering amazing things and combining them to create something new… but there are many differences between the creative work of caregiving, artwork creation, and technological invention.
You often reference logical systems in your practice, both in digital code and in everyday structures. How do you see these systems shaping our relationships to care, labor, and technology?
SB: Caregiving is like and unlike the world of technology. Caregiving is a process that feels never-ending, with no real beginning or end. Creative activities can be like this too, except that often there is an end result—you create a thing, or a technology in the case of mechanical engineering or design. In caregiving, there are so many unknowns, so many variables. And, in many ways, while I gave birth to the kids I care for, I want them to have their own beings. So it is less about creating a person and more about creating a space for them to grow. The creation of technology also involves unknowns and variables, but through the process, you might solve these problems. Caregiving isn’t like that. It is messy, chaotic, and human. Caregiving is also undervalued and unpaid. But it is the work that helps to support the next generation of humans.
‘CAREbots’ seem to probe the contradictions of technology as both a tool for empowerment and a product of capitalist systems that can exploit or commodify care. How do you navigate these tensions in your work?
SB: I basically struggle with this throughout the entire process. I guess it is also similar to my experiences learning and working in both art and engineering. Lately, I have been accepting and amplifying contradictions as a way to challenge notions of a clear, determinist, and inevitable technological process. I feel like there needs to be more space for the realization that the technology landscape is not clear-cut. People make technology; it is not created without their biases, ambitions, opinions, and thoughts. There is this common way of thinking of technology as separate from the people who make it—thinking of it as neutral. I guess I am really grappling with the way humanity is in our technology, with all its wonderful and terrifying aspects. And also, if this is the case, it is IMPERATIVE that the voices of all types of people are part of its inception and design, that all types of people have access to use it, and that it works for them as a support, not a replacement or adversary.
As a mother, you’ve spoken about the overlap between caregiving and creative practice. How does motherhood inform your work, and has it shifted your perspective on technology?
SB: It informs all of my work now, even when it isn’t explicit. Mostly, it’s the process of motherhood that seeps into the work. But motherhood shifts my perspective on basically everything. I feel like I have a new lens through which I see things—I find inequity in all systems related to having children. It is like I can’t unsee it. Motherhood has shown me so many things that I wish could be more equitable.
In many of these scenarios, technologies or systems with similar rule-based challenges are involved. But the lens has expanded to include areas outside of caregiving and into technology in general. I see the biases in the system of technology in the same way as I see the biases in the system of caregiving. Whose work is valued. Whose work is highly paid. Whose work is visible. In both systems. I wonder what it might be like if there were more voices from the sphere of caregiving in the world of technology? Would our technology be more caring?
In ‘Out of Bounds,’ your work is part of a larger conversation about the boundaries between art and technology. What excites or challenges you about being part of this conversation?
SB: I find the challenge of grappling with the contradictions, differences, and similarities interesting, and it keeps me engaged in the process. I have found that if something seems to have an “easy” answer, I lose interest quickly. I like the struggle and grappling with things that I don’t know or am trying to make sense of.
Engineers are taught to design solutions by identifying variables and developing technology solutions that work with those variables in mind. People are not like that. They are messier, more complicated. Also, perhaps art is messier. While there is a lot of problem-solving that goes into it, you can reveal the contradictions, amplify the conundrums, and play with illogical systems without trying to design them out of the system.
Art can play with the breaking of technology to show the humans who created it, to show the differences between humans and technology, and between biology and technology. In some ways, art can critique capitalist systems, and many technologies must work within them.
By using technology as the medium, the work asks many questions about these structures and the various power structures within our technologies. I guess there are power structures in the art world, too. But, in some ways, I have the freedom to shine a light on bias I see in the technological systems through art that I would not have if I were making technology.
View ‘Out of Bounds: Pushing the Lines Between Technology and Art’
Our March 2026 exhibition features work by Sarah Buckius.
Exhibition | Curator’s Statement | First Friday Exhibitions
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This interview has been edited for length and clarity. All images published with permission of Sarah Buckius; featured artwork: video still from “If (x = Robot), Then (y = Move fast and break things); In the (z = Self-Cleaning House); of (n = Coherent Nonsense); While (m = Being Mechanical Turk);”