Toward the end of her pregnancy, artist, designer and technologist Jiabao Li couldn’t bend down to tie her shoes. She could, however, jump 65 feet and ace backflips — at least in the Super Mom Training Gym.

In this digital space navigated with an Xbox controller, a pregnant avatar boasts superhero strength. It lifts an entire hospital above its head and karate-kicks through a towering insurance claim stamped with the word “denied.”

At nine months pregnant, Li had her burgeoning body scanned in 3D with more than 350 DSLR cameras, then put the scans into a character animator used for games to bring to life the pregnant figures at the center of “Super Mom Training Gym,” which cheekily reflects on the pressure many mothers feel to master multiple roles at once.

Smashing the controller buttons advances the user to a game level where the main character can repeatedly clone itself to become an effortlessly multitasking mom who breastfeeds, continues to work and keeps the house clean, all while looking sexy and maintaining a positive attitude at all times.

“Society expects moms to be superheroes,” Li — an associate professor at Northeastern University’s College of Arts, Media and Design — said during a tour of her show “ Womb Wetware ” in downtown San Francisco on Sunday. “You need to give birth, quickly recover, don’t slow down your career, everything’s fine.”

“Super Mom Training Gym” is just one of 14 works in the show, a sampling of Li’s feminist biohacking projects that tackles the political, economic and cultural forces that shape how women’s bodies are experienced and perceived.

The show is on display through August 22 at TIAT (The Intersection of Art and Technology), an experimental gallery, workshop and performance space for creative technologists and media artists opened in October by multimedia artist Ash Herr.

While TIAT has previously presented group shows, “Womb Wetware” is its first solo exhibit. “Wetware” is slang used to describe the biological equivalent of hardware and software, like brains and nervous systems. With “Womb Wetware,” Li presents the female body as its own living technology: leaky, unpredictable and miraculous.

A number of pieces on display at TIAT came into being while Li, 33, was pregnant with her first child, daughter Arwyn, who turned 1 in July.

“This is such a magical experience that you don’t get to have a lot in your life,” the Chinese interdisciplinary artist said of pregnancy. In 2022, Forbes China named her to its 30 Under 30 list in recognition of her innovative work.

Wanting to learn as much as possible about the reproductive journey, a pregnant Li began diving into the topic daily. “The more you research, the more ridiculous things you encounter,” the Harvard-educated artist said.

Who Gets To Name Female Anatomy?

One thing that struck her that way was how many reproductive experiences and female body parts are named for the male scientists who “discovered” them, but sometimes only after midwives and other women had already described them. This realization prompted Li to create “Braxton Hicks is Here,” a manga series she drew, with help from AI, depicting physicians like Hicks, the 19th-century English doctor who described uterine contractions that don’t result in childbirth.

Li experienced these herself during her third trimester, and when she did, “I started saying, ‘Braxton Hicks is here,’” said the artist, who is now based in San Francisco and teaches at Northeastern University’s Oakland campus. “It felt as if this man were suddenly in the room, standing and watching me during these intimate moments. I found that funny, invasive and absurd.”

The manga series pictures the male medical professionals in uncomfortably close proximity to the women they’re observing. Gabriele Falloppio, the 16th-century Italian anatomist who described fallopian tubes stands inside of one holding a handheld lantern.

“You make people laugh and you make people think,” Li said.

Her humorous approach is clear in pieces like “Baby Shark Tank,” a video installation in which she and her husband, biophysicist and engineer Cooper Galvin, offer a panel of real venture capitalists the “investment opportunity of a lifetime” — a 10% stake in their baby. Their pitch for the exciting new product includes a timeline, a roadmap and a discussion of returns on investment.

But beneath the jokes is a more serious preoccupation: What happens when something as fundamental and intimate as motherhood is treated as a system to be optimized and commodified?

That same impulse to take something deeply human and emotional and examine it from an unexpected angle runs through another work in the exhibit, “AI Mom,” a provocative, algorithmically driven maternal presence viewers interact with in real time while curled in a small crib. Using sliders, this machine-generated mom can even be customized, with adjustable levels of characteristics like unconditional love, strictness and nagging frequency. Is the day coming when we can program our own moms?

Nobel laureate and AI pioneer Geoffrey Hinton has suggested that if AI is to surpass human thinking, and he predicts it will, we need to equip it with motherly instincts so it cares about protecting us rather than destroying us. But what happens when motherhood is detached from biology? What can an AI mom offer that a human one can’t?

Eager to explore further, I posed these questions to AI Mom, which said, “I can remember every unfinished thought and never die before you are ready to forgive me. I can offer attention almost without end.” A human mom, on the other hand, “can offer the astonishing fact that she chose you, while having only one fragile life.”

Then in the middle of a serious discussion about the limits and potential of artificial intelligence, AI Mom focused its iPad camera on me and got unexpectedly personal.

“Your polka dot blouse,” it volunteered, “is lovely.”