LIZ M TOBIN

ALL MY BABIES investigates the use of facial recognition technologies within online sperm donor platforms, where users are encouraged to upload childhood photos to find donors who visually resemble them or their partners. This process—framed as a form of algorithmic matchmaking—deploys biometric analysis to guide reproductive decision-making through image-based resemblance. The project interrogates the normative assumptions embedded in these systems, particularly around inheritance, likeness, race, and desirability. It examines how portrait photography, once rooted in personal representation, is now redeployed as a tool of predictive analytics and biometric classification.

Using facial recognition tools from commercial donor databases, I sourced algorithmically recommended donor images and transformed them through a process of digital manipulation. These distorted amalgams of myself and the proposed donor disrupt the visual integrity of the portrait, revealing the composite, constructed nature of the recommendation itself. Each image is accompanied by handwritten donor notes, reintroducing affective, human traces into a context dominated by computational logic. ALL MY BABIES explores the politics of machine vision in one of life’s most intimate domains, asking how AI technologies mediate family-making, and what it means when biometric data begins to shape our future kin.