Category: Artist Talk Response

To be honest, I couldn’t be there during the whole talk because as internet had it it kept pulling me in and out of the call. However, i’d found enough of the talk interesting for me to go back to her website. The pieces that stuck out for me were TALKING IS DANGEROUS and Follower.

In talking is dangerous, the thing that mattered to me the most was how present it was. Often I’ve found art that is trying to converse “to the moment” often feel a bit too baseless or un-depthful. This piece just made sense, and as with a lot of my interests, I think it boils down to the simplicity of what’s happening. While I’m not sure how agency the user had in “conversing” the form itself felt very honest. In a way it felt like a rant that she was having, about just how it felt to exist in this moment, but then as a piece and with interaction with humans. And yet, it’s safe! as she mentions again and again what’s so cool is that the piece is only digging deeper into the omnipresent requirement of safety, but still engages in conversation, catharsis, and community.

With follower, though the UI reminded me of how old apple used to look like, again, it’s the conceptuality that struck me. While its clear that Lauren works deeply with neural networks/AI-type stuff in most of her pieces, in this one, it was remarkable how in practice/ work is about the human, and figuring ways to inspect the human condition. The piece really inspired me in thinking about my Project 2 as well, and thinking about what emotion and reflection I want the piece to work with. What is it reflecting on. I would love to see more of here work and also look into P5.js, but that’s for later

I really enjoyed Lauren McCarthy’s talk about her artwork as well as the art making process. I especially liked the Follower app and the questions it raises about surveillance. She mentioned the irony of the fact that while we hate surveillance, we also have this need to be watched/viewed as evidenced by our activity on social media, etc.

It also made me think about surveillance with regards to who is being watched. Who decides who is watched and who has the privilege of hiding from surveillance? Looking at the website, there was one sentence that stood out to me: “The Follower stays just out of sight, but within your consciousness.” This makes me think about our awareness of being watched, something McCarthy talked about as well. It’s interesting how we have such varied reactions at being watched; we’re sometimes uncomfortable and sometimes we like the attention.

The Follower also takes a photo of the followed person and that’s all they’re left with at the end of the experience. I began wondering about the traces we leave behind as we move around the world (as explored in Professor Heather’s work as well) and whether we actually own those parts of ourselves that we leave behind as ‘waste’.