Lauren Lee McCarthy is a Chinese-American LA-based artist examining social relationships in the context of surveillance, automation, and network culture through performance, software, and installation. Her works consist of performances inviting viewers to engage. To remote control her dates. To be followed. To welcome her in as their human smart home. To attend a party hosted by artificial intelligence. In these interactions, there is a reciprocal risk taking and vulnerability, as performer and audience are both challenged to relinquish control, both implicated, as each reformulate their own relationship to the systems that govern our lives.
Lauren has received numerous grants, fellowships, and residencies from Creative Capital, United States Artists, Sundance New Frontier, Eyebeam, Mass MoCA, Pioneer Works, Stanford, NYU, Carnegie Mellon, Autodesk, and Ars Electronica. Her work SOMEONE was awarded the Ars Electronica Golden Nica, the highest prize in media arts, and the Japan Media Arts Social Impact Award. Her work LAUREN was awarded the IDFA DocLab Award for Immersive Non-Fiction. Lauren's work has been widely exhibited internationally, including at the Barbican Centre, Seoul Museum of Art, House of Electronic Arts in Switzerland, Onassis Cultural Center in Greece, IDFA DocLab, Science Gallery Dublin, Yamaguchi Center for Arts and Media, Asia Culture Center, and Japan Media Arts Festival.
Lauren is also the creator of p5.js, an open-source art and education platform that prioritizes access and diversity in learning to code. With over two million users, it is taught in K-12 to universities worldwide. Leading the project for eight years involved maintaining a codebase, website, and documentation, leading advocacy and outreach, creating curriculum, organizing conferences, and developing mentorship programs. Lauren is a Professor at UCLA. Holding an MFA from UCLA and a BS Computer Science and BS Art and Design from MIT, she has also worked as a software developer, and immersive installation designer.
In her work Social Turkers, Lauren crowdsourced a series of 30 OkCupid dates, livestreaming them to gig workers online, who were paid to watch and direct her. Follower was a performance that takes the form of a service that provides a real life follower for day. Participants download an app which allows Lauren to locate and physical trail them throughout the day, leaving them at the end of the day with a single photo documentation. In LAUREN, Lauren attempts to become a human Amazon Alexa, installing devices to remotely watch over and control inhabitants’ homes for days at a time, reflecting on the role of AI in intimate spaces. 24 HOUR HOST was a durational performance consisting of a 24 hour party, automated by software. An AI analyzed the guests in real-time and delivered directions via earpiece to the host: what to say, what to serve, who to introduce to whom. Lauren’s large-scale immersive installation The Changing Room imagines a smart architecture that guides emotions, creating a performative, interactive landscape for visitors to engage with each other in new ways.
