Lauren McCarthy
Lauren McCarthy is an artist based in Los Angeles whose work explores current social and technological systems and structures for being a person and interacting with other people. Lauren has exhibited at Ars Electronica, Conflux Festival, SIGGRAPH, LACMA, and the Japan Media Arts Festival, and worked on installations for the London Eye, US Holocaust Memorial Museum, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art. She holds an MFA from UCLA and a BS Computer Science and BS Art and Design from MIT. She is an Assistant Professor at UCLA Design Media Arts, and was previously a resident at CMU STUDIO for Creative Inquiry and Eyebeam.
An immersive digital experience inspired by the question: how does it feel to be inside someone else’s social media stream?
Lauren McCarthy and Kyle McDonald, 2014
A mobile app-based performance that allows you to hire an IRL Follower for one day. The following lasts one day, and you don’t know when it will happen. At the end, you are left with one photo of you, taken by their Follower. The Follower stays just out of sight, but within your consciousness.
p5.js is a JavaScript library that starts with the original goal of Processing — to make coding accessible for artists, designers, educators, and beginners — and reinterprets this for today’s web. Using the original metaphor of a software sketchbook, p5.js has a full set of drawing functionality for the entire browser page. For this, p5.js has addon libraries that streamline interaction with other HTML5 objects, including text, input, video, webcam, and sound. It is a platform and a community that takes diversity and inclusivity as a core value.
Lauren McCarthy + collaborators, 2013-ongoing