Hyejo Seo-Looking Outwards 11

‘How We Act Together’ is a project done by an artist, Lauren Lee McCarthy. She is a LA based artist who explores “social relationships in the midst of surveillance, automation, and algorithm living.” After looking through her projects, I realized that most of her projects put the viewers out of their comfort zones. For example, her other project called “SOMEONE” is a human version of Amazon Alexa. McCarthy recruited four households across America in which she installed cameras and microphones. When viewers come to the installation at the museum, they get to play the role of human Alexa. When I first read about this project, I was a little creeped out quite frankly because, if people get paid to be strangers’ “someone” behind the screens in the future, it would be creepy. 

Just like her “SOMEONE” installation, McCarthy challenged people to feel somewhat uncomfortable by “asking participants to repeat different gestures until exhausted, to a point where the gesture no long feels natural and its meaning begins to shift” in her “How We Act Together” project. Evidently, she is playing around different gestures and facial expressions that are used in social situations. Using a software, participants are asked to scream, which will be detected by the computer once their gestures conform to the metrics of computer vision algorithms. As participants are screaming to the screen as seen in the video above, the screen displays another person screaming back at them. Looking at strangers screaming back at you eventually triggers a natural response from the current participant. 

I chose to talk about Lauren’s projects because she pushes participants to a point where they feel uncomfortable by manipulating awkward and uncomfortable social situations. I thought it was really interesting that she exposes  her participants to different social phenomenon, which triggers  uncomfortable responses. Her projects make one think deeper into uncomfortable social situations we are constantly exposed to.