Key Moments
Artist Lauren McCarthy Will Be Your Home's Brain
Y CombinatorKey Moments
Artist Lauren McCarthy creates "human smart homes" where she remotely monitors and controls clients' lives, exploring technology's impact on human interaction and identity.
Key Insights
McCarthy's art explores human systems, expectations, and the impact of technology on our lives, often highlighting personal anxieties and societal patterns.
Her projects, like "Social Triggers," involve relinquishing control to external systems or others, revealing personal limitations annd fostering self-awareness.
She advocates for inclusive technology design, exemplified by p5.js, aiming to create welcoming spaces for diverse users in the tech and open-source communities.
McCarthy critiques the superficiality of "smart home" technology, contrasting it with her "LAUREN" project, which offers a deeply personalized, human-driven home experience.
The challenge of valuing and selling digital art is a significant hurdle, with artists exploring various models like blockchain and custom contracts.
Humor is a key tool in McCarthy's work, making complex or potentially frightening technological futures more accessible and thought-provoking for audiences.
EXPLORING HUMAN SYSTEMS THROUGH ART
Artist Lauren McCarthy's work delves into the fundamental systems governing human interaction and the pervasive influence of technology. Her art often grapples with the confusion and anxieties arising from these systems, analyzing societal expectations, rituals, and individual behaviors. McCarthy seeks to understand the limits we impose on ourselves and how technology might exacerbate or resolve these challenges, prompting viewers to question their own patterns of interaction and perception.
THE SOCIAL TRIGGERS EXPERIMENT
A notable project, "Social Triggers," involved McCarthy going on blind dates while discreetly streaming the encounters to observers who provided real-time instructions. This experiment aimed to explore self-imposed limitations and identity. By following external directives, McCarthy discovered that actions she initially perceived as uncomfortable or "not her" were often met with neutral responses, revealing the narrow confines of her self-perception and demonstrating a newfound freedom in relinquishing control.
CHAMPIONING INCLUSIVE TECHNOLOGY
McCarthy's interest extends to making technology more accessible and welcoming, particularly within the often-exclusive tech and open-source communities. Her involvement with p5.js, a creative coding framework, emphasizes design choices that prioritize diversity, encourage participation, and offer robust documentation. The goal is to create a space where individuals, regardless of their coding experience or background, feel comfortable contributing and exploring their creativity.
THE FACEBOOK MOOD MANIPULATOR AND DIGITAL EXTENSIONS
Projects like the "Facebook Mood Manipulator" reflect McCarthy's critical engagement with platforms that influence user emotions. This tool allowed users to adjust the sentiment of their feed, probing the idea of mood manipulation. Similarly, collaborative projects like "Us Plus" for Google Hangouts utilized speech and facial analysis to provide real-time conversational feedback, highlighting the desire for optimized social interactions and questioning the nature of empathy in digital communication.
THE PERSONALIZED 'LAUREN' SMART HOME
McCarthy's latest venture, "LAUREN," positions her as a human "smart home" intelligence. Unlike automated systems like Alexa, "LAUREN" involves McCarthy remotely monitoring and interacting with a client's home environment via devices and cameras. This project critiques the impersonal nature of current smart home technology by offering a deeply personalized, human-driven experience, exploring the potential and implications of having a human directly engaged with and managing one's domestic life.
HUMANITY BEHIND THE SCENES
The "LAUREN" project also examines the role of human labor in services like Uber or TaskRabbit, where unseen individuals perform tasks. McCarthy's service, though remote, highlights the human element behind technological interfaces. It questions whether a human's involvement offers a superior or more meaningful connection compared to AI, and explores the potential for empathy and relationship-building in these mediated interactions, even if the human operator is not physically present.
EMPATHY, CONTROL, AND THE 'LAUREN' EXPERIENCE
McCarthy acknowledges the potential for developing empathy and emotional attachment when observing individuals closely, as in the "LAUREN" project. The service is designed as a limited-duration performance, typically lasting a few days, to provide an intense yet manageable experience. This approach allows participants to glimpse a unique form of technologically mediated human connection without overwhelming them, while McCarthy gains insights into human behavior and desires.
NAVIGATING THE DIGITAL ART MARKET
The art world faces challenges in valuing and selling digital creations. McCarthy notes the lack of standardized models for digital art ownership and the complexities of maintaining digital works over time. While some artists use contracts or explore blockchain verification, a universally accepted framework remains elusive, impacting the financial sustainability and recognition of digital artists compared to their traditional counterparts.
THE ROLE OF HUMOR IN TECHNOLOGICAL CRITIQUE
McCarthy utilizes humor as a powerful tool to engage audiences with complex and potentially unnerving technological advancements. Unlike media that often focuses on dystopian scenarios, her work invites reflection through absurdity and wit. This approach makes critical examination of emerging technologies more accessible, encouraging viewers to consider the future implications of their choices in a way that is thought-provoking rather than purely fear-inducing.
INFLUENCES AND ARTISTIC PATHWAYS
McCarthy draws inspiration from artists like Sophie Calle and Jilma Gede, who explore surveillance and personal narratives, as well as performance artists. Her interest in filmmaking is evident in her appreciation for "Synecdoche, New York." For aspiring artists, she recommends tools like Processing, p5.js, and Arduino, emphasizing the importance of online communities and experimentation over formal schooling, and encouraging a focus on developing a unique perspective when creating art.
Mentioned in This Episode
●Products
●Software & Apps
●Companies
●Organizations
●Concepts
●People Referenced
Common Questions
Lauren McCarthy's art primarily explores the systems we use to be a person and interact with others, questioning whether technology solves all problems or creates more. She focuses on people, their expectations, rituals, patterns, and the strange things humans do, both alone and together.
Topics
Mentioned in this video
A past art project by Lauren McCarthy where she discreetly streamed blind dates and had people on Amazon Mechanical Turk instruct her on what to say or do.
A JavaScript library that McCarthy worked on, aimed at opening up art and technology, with a core goal of building a space where people feel welcome.
A text analysis method used by McCarthy's Facebook Mood Manipulator and the Facebook study to tag words based on different qualifiers and categorize sentiment.
A smart home device similar to Amazon Alexa, which McCarthy mentions in the context of the rise of home automation.
An extension for Google Hangouts developed by McCarthy and Kyle McDonald that used speech-to-text and facial analysis to optimize conversations, and could auto-mute users who talked too much.
A service McCarthy is developing where she would come into someone's home, set up devices and cameras, watch them, and control their home, aiming to be more anticipatory and caring than Alexa.
A programming language that the host used and found helpful to learn, especially with the ability to ask mentors basic questions.
McCarthy's official website where most of her projects are first released as videos or interventions.
A crowdsourcing marketplace where Lauren McCarthy paid people small amounts of money to watch her dates and give her instructions.
An Amazon smart home device that McCarthy finds provocative, comparing its user acceptance favorably to Google Glass and noting its gradual integration into homes.
A service where people perform chores, mentioned in the context of human labor behind technology and the potential for relationships to form between service providers and clients.
The website for the p5.js platform, which leads development on and is a resource for those interested in making code art.
A programming language McCarthy uses and likes, particularly in the context of building tools like p5.js.
An extension McCarthy created in 2014 that allowed users to select desired emotional metrics (positive, optimistic, etc.) and then filtered their Facebook posts accordingly.
An artist and collaborator with Lauren McCarthy, who worked on projects like Plus Plus and has a technical focus on machine learning and computer vision.
An artist whose work on surveillance and personal observation, particularly her project involving a rope and a collaborator, influences McCarthy.
An artist based in LA and assistant professor at UCLA Design Media Arts, who creates art exploring systems of human interaction and the impact of technology.
An artist whose work on surveillance and personal observation influences McCarthy.
An artist whose work McCarthy admires, specifically mentioning her project involving being tied by a rope to a collaborator for a year.
A fiction author whose books McCarthy enjoys, believing that fiction can change one's personality.
A centerpiece for conversation that visually detected who was talking and provided single-word cues for what to say or talk about.
An art project by McCarthy that detected smiling and would lightly tap the wearer on the head until they resumed smiling, intended to train the brain.
A wearable computer that experienced significant public rejection upon its release, used by McCarthy as a point of comparison for the acceptance of devices like Alexa.
A social media platform, the name of which was a play on the title of the Plus Plus Google Hangouts extension.
A platform for distributing images and a Kickstarter project that commissioned artists to incorporate their backers into their artwork.
A messaging app mentioned for its 'shake' feature, which McCarthy finds pointless but sweet, as an example of subtle, sometimes connecting, digital interactions.
A ride-sharing service mentioned as an example of platforms that involve human labor behind the technology.
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