program
Editing : Thierry Fournier
Interactive installation, 2017
The Changing Room is a networked installation run by an intelligence that manages your feelings. As you enter in The Changing Room, the intelligence asks “how do you want to feel?”. After selecting from one of over 200 emotions, the algorithm reacts, inducing the chosen feeling simultaneously for you and every other person in the space. To create this work, Lauren Lee McCarthy worked with a team of collaborators, trying to become the algorithm, scanning open source images, training ourselves with the endless data online, generating text and speech
Installation commissioned by Ogden Contemporary Arts
Web Design and Development by Surplus+ (Melanie Hoff, Angeline Meitzler, Sam Panter, and Dan Taeyoung), Wylie Kasai
Design by Seenahm Suriyasat, Leming Zhong, and Sharareh Samangani.
Writing by Clara Leivas.
Sound Design by Kawandeep Virdee.
Technical Installation by William Peterson.
Additional Technical Installation by Harvey Moon / MB Labs.
Curated by and special thanks to Venessa Castagnoli.
Video of a performance, 0’58
At the end of 2020, after a particularly difficult year marked by physical distance and a lack of social ties, Lauren Lee McCarthy felt the urgent need to reconnect with her friends and family.
Then she creates Sleepover, a light-hearted performance in which she invited herself to spend the night out at her friends’lawn, without approaching them and interacting with them only by text messages.
A break outdoor, far from confinement and screens, to become aware of each other’s physical presence.
Photography by David Leonard
Cinematography by Gabriel Noguez
Video of a performance with interactive device, 2’28
In 2020, just out of global confinement due to the Covid 19 pandemic, Lauren Lee McCarthy, feeling completely disconnected, created I heard TALKING IS DANGEROUS trying to break through. She made this performance as an alternative for interacting with others via mobile phone, while complying with the health and safety rules at the time (masks must be worn and the recommended distance between two people was about six feet). Showing up on neighbour’s doorsteps, she delivered a monologue via phone screen and text-to-speech. She invited each person she met to visit an URL on their phone to continue the conversation safely.
Photography by Kat Kaye.
Special thanks to Evelyn Masso, Leah Wardell, Samantha Culp, Joel Kelly, David Leonard, Qianqian Ye, Harvey Moon.
Video of a performance and network installation, 1’49
In 2013, Lauren Lee McCarthywent on twenty dates with people she met on the online dating site OkCupid. She used her phone to stream these dates to the Internet. She paid remote workers on a site called Amazon Mechanical Turk to watch, interpret what was happening, and direct her of what to do or say next. These directions were communicated to her via text messages and she had to perform them immediately. By hijacking the service offered by Amazon’s micro-working platform, Lauren Lee McCarthy opens up the debate: What if we could receive realtime feedback on our social interactions? Would third party monitors be better suited to interpret and make decisions for the parties involved? Could this make us more aware in our relationships, shift us out of normal patterns, and open us to unexpected possibilities?
Music : Eric Gunther
Interactive installation
Exhausted by Zoom calls, Lauren Lee McCarthy created a digital clone of her voice to replace her. This voice allows her to puppet herself, using it to say all the things she hadn’t previously been able to embody. This interactive installation allows visitors to take control of the artist’s voice by simply answering the question: “What do you want me to say?” Whatever the visitor’s answer is, it will be repeated word for word by the artist - or at least her vocal double. This work considers vulnerability, ownership, and authenticity in a time of rapidly advancing virtual reality. As Lauren Lee opens access to her voice, she also reflects on the ways female voiced virtual assistants are commanded and controlled by their users and their developers. And the ways we can feel heard and (mis) understood by those that listen.
Installation and series of six videos: Intended Parents (5’16), Hysterical (9’25), Choose a Donor (2’12), Psych eval (1’47), App (2’11), Blood Donation (1’39), HD color sound
Exhibited at Le Lieu Unique in the form of a large installation, Surrogate is a project in progress, consisting of a series films, sculptures, installations, publications, and a live performance. For this deeply personal work Lauren Lee McCarthy offers her body as physical, emotional, and conceptual surrogate, to people who want to become parents, and to follow a fictional pregnancy using an app she created (Surrogate App) to monitor and control her for nine months, 24/7. The futur parents would have complete control over the body in which their baby is growing, driving Lauren Lee on what she would eat, what she would do, and more. This experience serves as a metaphor for the control we may soon hold through processes of genetic engineering. It’s also a reflection about the evolution of reproductive rights legislation around the world.
Performance in collaboration with Dorothy R. Santos.
Cinematography: Gabriel Noguez.
Intended Parents film directed by David Leonard.
Intended Parents film camera assistance from Liz Ehlers, Jake Frankenfield, and John Szczepaniak.
Intended Parents film featuring Maui Santos & Miguel Cavazos, Howard Cai & Jose Infante, Sam Congdon, Oliver Mason & Sophia Lapaglia, Yasi Salek & Sean Preston, Nathalie Shapiro & Glen Callahan, Catherine Cray & Debra Smalley, Ari Huber & Christine Cabana, Diana Hardy & Antoine Ramsey, Fredrik Bystzof & Karen Bystzof, and Dorothy R. Santos.
Surrogate App design by Stefanie Tam.
Prosthetics design and fabrication by Paul Esposito.
Studio assistance from Lela Barclay de Tolly, Karina Lopez, Chelly Jin, and Wylie Kasai.
Psych Eval film voice: Jennifer Steinkamp.
With support from Creative Capital Award, United States Artist Fellowship, the MacDowell Fellowship, the Sundance Institute New Frontier Story Lab, the Sundance Institute Art of Practice Fellowship, Pioneer Works Tech Residency, and the KW Institute for Contemporary Art, and UCLA.
Video of an installation and performance, 24’40
SOMEONE imagines a human version of Amazon Alexa, a smart home intelligence for people in their own homes. For a two month period, four participants’ homes around the United States were installed with custom-designed smart devices, including cameras, microphones… In the same time, an art gallery in New York City housed a command center where visitors could peek into the four homes via laptops, watch over them, and remotely control their networked devices. Visitors would hear smart home occupants call out for “Someone”— prompting the visitors to step in as their home automation assistant and respond to their needs. With increasingly sophisticated artificial intelligence now omnipresent in our daily lives, Lauren Lee McCarthy asks the question: does human intelligence still have something to offer?
Software and hardware development by Harvey Moon and Josh Billions.
Furniture design in collaboration with and fabrication by Lela Barclay de Tolly.
Smart home participant collaborators include Valeria Haedo, Adelle Lin, Amanda McDonald Crowley, and Ksenya Samarskaya.
SOMEONE was created with support from a Google Focused Research Award and the Harvestworks New Works Residency.
Video of an installation and performance, 3’50
Following on from SOMEONE, Lauren Lee McCarthy creates LAUREN, in which she attempts to become a human version of Amazon Alexa, a smart home intelligence. The artist installed a series of specially designed intelligent devices (cameras, microphones, switches, locks, taps, etc.) in several volunteer homes. For a week, 24/7, the artist devoted herself to monitoring the homes, in the hope of surpassing artificial intelligence. LAUREN is a meditation on smart homes. The performance questions the role and added value of the human being in a future that is turning more and more towards automation. LAUREN also highlights the ambiguity of a situation where, in order to live more comfortably, people are prepared to let artificial intelligence intrude on their privacy.
LAUREN Testimonials film and 360 photography by David Leonard.
LAUREN film featuring Miriam Malabel, Rudolf Wolf, Sean Rowry, Xiuling Leonard, Megan Daalder, Alex Takacs, Kristin Hardin, Jack McCarthy, Mark McCarthy, Stuart Douglas, Jenny Douglas, Delilah Douglas,
Ruby Douglas, Missy Douglas, and Amber Sharp.
LAUREN object design & fabrication by Nick Rodrigues.
This project was supported in part by Sundance Institute’s New Frontier Lab Programs, with a grant from Turner Broadcasting, and UCLA.
Lauren Lee McCarthy et David Leonard · Video of an installation and performance, 9’04
With millions of aging citizens, the United States are facing a crisis of care. When confronted with the prospect of caring for aging relatives, artificial intelligence systems like Alexa and Google Home can augment care and stand in for the presence of family, friends, and medical providers. In a one week durational performance, Lauren Lee McCarthy and her team embodied the role of A.I., functioning as a remote virtual caregiver in 80-year-old Mary Ann’s home in North Carolina. A film documents this performance, and the relationship that developed between Mary Ann and the virtual care system which she named “I.A. Suzie”. I.A. Suzie puts the viewer into the role of virtual care system. This interactive film created from a reallife scenario asks us to confront our relationship with A.I. partners at the end of life.
This project was supported in part by a Journalism 360 Award from the Google News Initiative, Knight Foundation and Online News Association, and a grant from UCLA.
Que puis-je pour vous ? (What can I do for you?) is the first solo exhibition in France by Californian artist Lauren Lee McCarthy, bringing together installations, interactive works, and performance videos in a large-scale display.
Lauren Lee McCarthy creates situations in which she frequently takes the place of devices (personal assistants, AIs, even fictitious surrogate mothers) by dialoguing with their users and following their orders. By taking on these roles, she brings out the human where we least expect it, raising universal questions about care, attention, otherness, and control. Her videos are primarily records of her performances, in which the artist involves the audience and always implicates herself personally.
For example, in LAUREN, Lauren Lee McCarthy invites people to install a personal assistant similar to Alexa or Google Home in their homes, with the fundamental difference that it is not driven by software but by the artist herself, present at a distance and speaking in a synthesized voice. She watches over them, adjusts the heating, advises them on haircuts, and answers their every question. In IA Suzie, the same device is installed in the home of an elderly person, with whom she interacts on a daily basis, assisting her with her health routine, thereby opening up a rather dizzying dimension of solitude and responsibility. The monumental installation The Changing Room confronts the audience with an environment entirely tailored to their emotions including texts, sounds, and lights.
While these works can be seen as a critique of a technicist culture, Lauren Lee McCarthy claims that her works also provide a positive connection with others. In this sense, her approach continuously questions the way our behaviour and social relationships are transformed by technology.
The choice of works for this exhibition is designed to highlight the many relationships between them. The exhibition design echoes and amplifies the artist’s domestic aesthetic in a non-linear path, as if the architecture of Le Lieu Unique were transformed into a film studio or a furniture superstore: each work is displayed in a global space that connects it to the others. In this way, the exhibition as a whole creates a fictional space in which the critical boundaries between technology and humanity, private and public life, are constantly redrawn.
Thierry Fournier,
curator and scenographer of the exhibition
Lauren Lee McCarthy lives and works in Los Angeles.
As an artist, she explores social relationships in the midst of automation, surveillance, and algorithmic living. Her participatory practice spans media including software, electronics, internet, film, photography, and installation.
Her works consist of performances inviting viewers to engage and invite them to reformulate their own relationship to the systems that govern our lives.
She is also the creator of p5.js, an opensource art and education platform that prioritizes access and diversity in learning to code. She expanded on this work in her role from
2015–21 on the Board of Directors for the Processing Foundation, whose mission is to serve those who have historically not had access to the fields of technology, code, and art in learning software and visual literacy. She’s also a Professor at UCLA Design Media Arts.
She has received grants and residencies from Creative Capital, United States Artists, LACMA, Sundance, Eyebeam, Pioneer Works, Autodesk, and Ars Electronica.
Her work SOMEONE was awarded the Ars Electronica Golden Nica and the Japan Media Arts Social Impact Award, and her work LAUREN was awarded the IDFA Award for Immersive Non-Fiction.
McCarthy’s work has been exhibited internationally, including at the Barbican Centre (London, UK), Fotomuseum Winterthur (Switzerland), Seoul Museum of Art (Korea), Chronus Art Center (China), SIGGRAPH (U.S.A), Onassis Cultural Center (Athens, Greece), and the Japan Media Arts Festival.
Thierry Fournier is a French artist, curator, author, graduate of the École nationale supérieure d’architecture of Lyon.
His practice addresses issues of otherness, co-presence, and sociality through a wide range of often digital media: installations, networked works, photography, video, and drawing. His work is regularly exhibited in France and abroad. His curatorial approach addresses similar questions on a collective scale.
Recent exhibitions include: This Land Is Your Land (Château de Goutelas, 2022); Selphish (Mécènes du Sud Montpellier-Sète, 2020); Collection Artem (first French public art school collection in Nancy from 2015 to 2020), The Watchers (Mori Tower, Tokyo, 2019), etc. He’s now teacher at Sciences Po Paris («L’Exercice du regard», contemporary art workshop).
Thierry Fournier had already exhibited Lauren Lee McCarthy’s work as part of Selphish exhibition, which he co-curated with Pau Waelder at Mécènes du Sud Montpellier-Sète, and featured her work in the online magazine antiatlas-journal.net, of which he is co-editor.
Thierry Fournier lives and works in the Perche area, France.
Curator, scenographer and French translation: Thierry Fournier
Production : Le Lieu Unique, scène nationale de Nantes,
Artistic collaborators : Wylie Kasai, assistant du studio de Lauren Lee McCarthy
et Thomas Gendre, assistant de Thierry Fournier et création 3D