Caring Futures?

Abstract

How do we understand care, humanity, and vulnerability under new technological regimes? Do concepts of care change with increasing technology use? With these questions in mind, we curated the art exhibition Caring Futures at Sølvberget gallery in Stavanger, Norway in autumn 2022. Produced as part of the interdisciplinary research project “Caring Futures: Developing Care Ethics for Technology-Mediated Care Practices” at the University of Stavanger, the exhibition became a creative site for articulating and visualising questions of future care and the entanglement between technological and social aspects of contemporary healthcare regimes, particularly in a Nordic welfare state. In this article, we introduce the exhibition and highlight some of the art projects that specifically grapple with ethical issues in ageing as well as the topic of enhancement, genetics, and bioethics. Our aim is to discuss how technology changes how we relate to our bodies, and our perception or tolerance of what is normal or expected. Care under new technological regimes holds the power of making us want to acquire the desirable, of improvement, but so far, the knowledge of social and individual costs is scarce. Thinking with and through art is a way of generating new knowledges of what is at stake for questions of health, care, and welfare in our times.