Interview
Artist Lauren McCarthy Will Be Your Home's Brain
- Lauren McCarthy is an artist and assistant professor in UCLA's Design Media Arts program whose work explores human social systems, identity constraints, and the impact of technology on interpersonal interaction.
- McCarthy states her primary artistic motivation is "what confuses me," specifically focusing on the rituals, expectations, and strange patterns of human behavior in relation to technology.
- Project: Social Turkers
- Created to address McCarthy's personal difficulties with dating, the project involved blind dates streamed to the web.
- Participants hired via Amazon Mechanical Turk provided real-time text instructions on what to say or do, which McCarthy was required to execute immediately.
- The experiment revealed that McCarthy's self-imposed identity limits were narrower than reality, as "weird" behaviors suggested by strangers did not result in negative social consequences.
- Giving up control initially caused discomfort but ultimately led to a lasting sense of freedom and looseness in social interactions, though it temporarily made spontaneous decision-making difficult.
- McCarthy switched to revealing the project to dates only after the fact to prevent the conversation from becoming dominated by the mechanics of the art.
- Project: P5.js
- McCarthy leads the development of p5.js, a JavaScript library designed to make creative coding accessible and to foster a welcoming environment for diverse demographics.
- The project's core design philosophy prioritizes inclusivity over technical novelty, aiming to support people who feel they do not fit into traditional tech spaces.
- Design decisions to attract diverse contributors include making the language understandable, heavy emphasis on documentation, and writing code with extensive comments and non-obscure structures.
- The user base has expanded beyond art to include data visualization in news and blog posts.
- Project: Facebook Mood Manipulator (2014)
- Developed as a browser extension in response to a Facebook study that altered user feeds to test mood manipulation without explicit consent.
- The tool allowed users to filter their news feed based on specific emotional metrics (positive, negative, optimistic, pessimistic) using the same Linguistic Inquiry Word Count (LIWC) methodology as the study.
- The extension is largely non-functional today due to frequent changes in Facebook's underlying infrastructure.
- Project: Us Plus
- A Google Hangouts extension co-developed with Kyle McDonald that analyzed speech patterns and facial expressions in real-time.
- Features included analyzing conversational tone and automatically muting users who talked excessively to encourage balance.
- The project relied on the "physical object" effect to encourage users to alter their behavior, though the underlying AI analysis was not highly sophisticated.
- Project: Conversa Cube
- A physical centerpiece for social gatherings that listened to conversation and provided one or two-word cues to guide interaction.
- McCarthy notes that physical objects often effectively grant users permission to break social norms and adopt new behaviors compared to digital apps.
- Current Project: "Lauren"
- McCarthy is building a service called "Lauren" where she manually acts as a human AI to control a user's home automation system (Alexa/Google Home ecosystem).
- The service involves installing cameras and smart devices, after which McCarthy will observe the user's daily life, control devices, and anticipate needs.
- The engagement is limited to approximately three days of active monitoring to prevent the experience from becoming overwhelming or creating unhealthy attachment.
- The project investigates the value of human emotional labor and the "human behind the scenes" in automated services, contrasting it with the impersonal nature of TaskRabbit or Mechanical Turk.
- The project includes a pre-signup consultation to establish context, ensuring the interaction is not entirely random.
- Project: Electric Objects
- For a Kickstarter campaign, McCarthy observed and queued social media profiles of 1,000 backers for eight hours a day over a week.
- The resulting performance was broadcast live, showing her screen and her facial reactions as she scrolled through the backers' public profiles.
- The work explored themes of surveillance and the intimacy of digital observation, inviting questions about whether a human observer feels more or less invasive than algorithmic surveillance.
- Business and Monetization Models
- McCarthy notes that selling digital art lacks a universal model due to the difficulty of defining ownership and the ease of copying files.
- She has experimented with pricing models, once charging for a widely distributed app to slow download speeds, which generated thousands of dollars before she made it free again.
- She avoids traditional manufacturing and Kickstarter models for physical artifacts, preferring to distribute software for mass reach and experimentation.
- Career and Personal Context
- McCarthy holds a background in computer science and art from MIT, citing a lack of formal social skills training as a driver for her interest in technology-mediated interaction.
- She met her husband, digital artist Kyle McDonald, through the "Social Turkers" project; he participated as a remote advisor and later collaborated on technical and theoretical projects.
- Her husband currently works on machine learning and computer vision, including projects involving projected reflections on mirror balls.
- Philosophy and Artistic Advice
- McCarthy employs humor as a "Flintstone vitamin" approach to technology criticism, using satire to make complex issues digestible while retaining truth.
- She believes contemporary media often over-indexes on fear (e.g., Black Mirror), whereas her work seeks to identify and amplify positive or interesting possibilities within technological trends.
- Her advice to art students is to prioritize building a network with peers and teachers over focusing solely on the work, and to actively ask questions rather than pretending to know the answers.
- She identifies as influenced by artists Sophie Kyle, Jill Magid, and performance artist Tino Sehgal, as well as fiction by Joyce Carol Oates and the film Synecdoche, New York.
- She advises aspiring creators to start with tools like p5.js or Arduino, but emphasizes that developing a unique perspective is more critical than technical proficiency.
- New signups for the "Lauren" home observation service will be announced on her website (lauren.mccarthy) and Twitter.