Lauren McCarthy is an artist that uses her skills in algorithms and technology to study social relationships in ways that haven’t been done before. Her first project mentioned is called Follower. The idea behind the project is that you sign up to be followed for a single day, which can give you a sense of importance as you know you are watched and noticed by at least a single person. It is a way of doing things that you consider enjoyable but at the same time allowing someone to watch you experience your day without the inconveniences of building a relationship from scratch.
Lauren McCarthy’s site has many more projects that analyze social relationships but the second one that she brought up was LAUREN, which acts like Alexa except that Lauren herself is behind it. There are obviously many things that Alexa can’t do compared to LAUREN as there is a human behind the camera that can tell you if your hair looks good. But with that human inclusion comes human error.
Next comes SOMEONE, which is a project variation of LAUREN except that it’s not Lauren herself on the other side of the camera, but people who want to experience being on that other side. The command center was created in a gallery with 4 homes across the country being monitored and the experience was open for people in the gallery.
The final project was a version of a smart pillow where there was a human controlling what is said from the pillow to the user without the user knowing it is a human. The experience was at a gallery where the control human can type text that is converted into speech for the user to hear or even play music. The question here was at what point will the user notice that this is controlled by a human, or will they notice at all?
Lastly, Lauren McCarthy created p5.js which is basically a web interpretation of processing and we have been using it in this class. The goal is inclusivity to allow an ease of access to people who feel excluded and remove the barrier of entry that exists in the open-source world.