作品

About the work

SOMEONE imagines a human version of Amazon Alexa, a smart home intelligence for people in their own homes. For a two month period in 2019, four participants’ homes around the United States were installed with custom-designed smart devices, including cameras, microphones, lights, and other appliances. 205 Hudson Gallery in NYC 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. This video installation presents documentation from the initial performance on four screens throughout the space.

About the artist

Lauren Lee McCarthy (she/they) is an artist examining social relationships in the midst of surveillance, automation, and algorithmic living. She is a 2020 Sundance New Frontier Story Lab Fellow, 2020 Eyebeam Rapid Response Fellow, 2019 Creative Capital Grantee, and has been a resident at Eyebeam, ZERO1, CMU STUDIO for Creative Inquiry, Autodesk, NYU ITP, and Ars Electronica. She is the recipient of grants from the Knight Foundation, the Online News Association, Mozilla Foundation, Google AMI, Sundance Institute New Frontiers Labs, Turner Broadcasting, and Rhizome. 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 DocLab Award for Immersive Non-Fiction. Lauren's work has been exhibited internationally, at places such as the Barbican Centre, Fotomuseum Winterthur, Haus der elektronischen Künste, SIGGRAPH, Onassis Cultural Center, IDFA DocLab, Science Gallery Dublin, Seoul Museum of Art, and the Japan Media Arts Festival. She holds an MFA from UCLA and a BS Computer Science and BS Art and Design from MIT. She is also the creator of p5.js, an open source programming language for learning creative expression through code online. She is Co-Director of the Processing Foundation, a non-profit whose mission is to promote software literacy within the visual arts, and visual literacy within technology-related fields—and to make these fields accessible to diverse communities. Lauren is an Associate Professor at UCLA Design Media Arts.