LO 8

Eyeo 2019 “Feeling at Home”
Lauren McCarthy

Lauren McCarthy is an artist, the creator of the p5.js library, and an associate professor at UCLA. According to her website her practice “examines social relationships in the midst of surveillance, automation, and algorithmic living”. In her lecture for eyeo she talks about a couple of her projects. These include a service that allows people to request to be followed by her for a day, a suite of smart-home devices called Lauren that she personally monitors and controls, and video of a series of dates in which she paid Mechanical Turk workers to watch her and give her live advice. I admire how her projects tend to be objectively hilarious, but also offer really novel ways of considering our relationship to technology. I also appreciate how within her talk she discusses a number of her works, but also ties them together as part of a larger narrative about her practice. She successfully avoids the artist talk becoming just a list of projects, but still gives us a good overview of her work.

https://lauren-mccarthy.com/