LO-08

I watched the video of Lauren McCarthy, a Los Angeles artist who explores ideas around social relationships, surveillance, and the rapidly changing technological field that is our modern world. She has created numerous art pieces looking into the intricate and ever developing relationship between social and technological systems.

What interested me most about Lauren’s talk is her exploration into the constant surveillance that modern citizens live with. Through her projects, she begins to ask questions about how changing technology has affected what it means to be “followed” or “watched.” My favorite work that she talked about was called “Follower,” and it was a conceptual “social media” app in which the user signs up to be silently and invisibly followed for a full day. This piece explores the relationship we have with technology by using an analogy with romantic human relationships, bringing to the surface the root of the conflicting comfort and discomfort we feel as we play the role of an actor in an everyday performance.