5 Sep 2023/length unknown/Lauren Lee McCarthy
MLow X Lauren Lee McCarthy
The creator of p5.js on artworks you must visit daily or they die, cloning her own voice before a company does, and NFTs as performance rather than pictures.
Lauren Lee McCarthy tells MLow her work is rarely just an image: software, internet and performance pieces that build a call to participation into the object itself. Her recent series Good Morning, 28 unique works in HTML, JavaScript and CSS minted through Manifold and listed with Vellum, dies unless the collector opens it and greets it every day. Its older sibling Good Night is a single NFT whose owner receives a good night text from Lauren every night for as long as she lives, made in 2021 as a pointed reply to blockchain forever talk: what do we mean by forever, and after I am dead, do I care? Both works treat ownership as an ongoing performance that travels with the token.
She studied computer science and art at MIT, and the whole career has probed what technology does to relationships. Pre web3 apps include Follower, an Uber for being followed in real life, and People Keeper (2014, with Kyle McDonald), which monitored how people made you feel and auto managed your contacts. Her human smart home works, LAUREN and SOMEONE, put her, and then gallery visitors, in the role of Alexa, attending to inhabitants' spoken requests. On AI she balances excitement about lowered barriers against bias in training sets, data privacy, IP and job loss, siding firmly with the striking Hollywood writers, and answers MLow's will AI take your job question by saying the artist's role is to offer a perspective a machine cannot reach. Her Feral File piece What Do You Want Me to Say distributes ownership of a clone of her own voice, made before a company could take it, which MLow connects to his own project of recording his grandmother's stories.
As a collector she holds everything and sells nothing, buying to support artists rather than to speculate: works by Jill Magid (flowers hacked from video game assets), Peter Burr pieces that change over time, and Auriea Harvey's sculptural The Mystery. Her taste runs to conceptual NFT work, Operator's on chain choreography release on Art Blocks and LoVid's analog to digital signals, over the generative default. Coming up: the Femgen show with VerticalCrypto at the Art Blocks event, a Feral File show on reproduction, and institutional exhibitions of her surrogacy project, in which she carried another couple's pregnancy plan to the point of an app giving them control over her body for nine months. The episode ends with her crediting p5.js, which she created and led, as a model of the supportive artist community she wants to keep building, and MLow inviting her into his fifty artist group chat.
What this episode teaches
- Build participation into the object
Lauren's works embed a call to participation: Good Morning dies if the collector fails to open it daily. The interaction is not a gimmick around the art, it is the medium, and it turns collectors into performers.
- Ownership can be a performance
Good Night is a single NFT whose owner gets a nightly text for as long as Lauren lives. Owning it means owning an ongoing relationship that travels with the token, a critical reflection on what forever and value mean on a blockchain.
- Clone your voice before a company does
What Do You Want Me to Say trains an AI on her own voice and sells access to it, so that she, not a platform, holds and distributes the clone. Owning your data can itself be the artwork.
- Platforms are material to subvert
From the App Store to YouTube to NFT marketplaces, she treats each platform as one more mode of intervention rather than a home. Web3 fit because the internet was already her first exhibition venue.
- Collect to support, not to speculate
She has never sold an NFT she collected. Buying is a way of backing artists she is excited about, and holding is part of the meaning, a collector ethic MLow highlights against the trading default.
- Look past the generative default
She finds the conceptual potential of NFTs underexplored: on chain choreography, mutable works, performance tokens. The unexpected uses that push the form excite her more than another generative series.
- The artist's job is the human perspective
On AI and automation, she concedes many jobs will shift or vanish, but argues artists remain because they offer a perspective not accessible to a machine, the same argument she credits the striking writers with making.
- Community infrastructure is art practice
She created and led p5.js, and counts building supportive spaces where artists make things together among her ongoing goals. The tool's community model shaped how a generation entered generative art.
The conversation, topic by topic
Work that demands participation
Lauren describes working across software, internet and performance, rarely making things that are only looked at. Good Morning is her example: collect the piece and you must visit it every day or it dies, built with HTML, JavaScript and CSS, minted on Manifold and listed with Vellum.
MIT and the pre web3 apps
She studied computer science and art at MIT and has questioned the social implications of technology ever since. Follower let people order a real life follower for a day; People Keeper (2014, with AI specialist Kyle McDonald) tracked how people made you feel, blocked the bad ones and scheduled the good ones.
AI hopes and concerns
She welcomes lowered barriers to making art but lists bias baked into training data, data privacy, intellectual property and job automation as open problems needing real conversation, not just excitement.
Will AI replace artists
MLow pushes: many people are content with Midjourney output. Lauren answers that jobs will genuinely shift, with real harm possible, but the artist's role becomes offering the human perspective a machine cannot access.
The writers strike
Asked about Hollywood, she calls the strike an inflection point: writers are arguing both that humans offer what AI cannot and that industries cannot run on autopilot, and what is decided will echo through many other fields.
What Do You Want Me to Say
Presented on Feral File, the piece is a digital clone of her own voice that repeats whatever visitors speak to it. Collectors take a share of ownership over her voice, but she is the one distributing it rather than a company, a response to data being harvested for AI training.
SOMEONE, the human smart home
Extending her piece LAUREN, in which she became a human Alexa controlling people's homes remotely, SOMEONE installed human smart home systems in four homes for two months while gallery visitors ran to computers to answer the inhabitants' requests, someone change the song, someone turn on my dinner.
MLow's grandmother project
The voice piece lands personally: MLow describes interviewing his grandmother to preserve her stories and wanting to build an AI with her voice, and Lauren agrees the technology feels surreal to experiment with.
Favorite artists in and out of web3
In web3 she names Operator (conceptual work on ownership and representation of women, including an Art Blocks release dealing with on chain choreography and the body) and LoVid (analog to digital signals), plus Artwrld releases like Jill Magid's flowers hacked from video game assets. Outside it she names Morehshin Allahyari, whose AI video works draw on Persian literature and cultural archiving, and Mimi Onuoha, whose missing data sets work exposes the politics of what never gets collected, down to decades of USDA agriculture advertising.
Her wallet
She holds everything she has collected, naming the Jill Magid piece, a Peter Burr work that changes over time, and Auriea Harvey's sculptural piece The Mystery as ones she returns to.
First sale and Good Night
Her first NFT sale came through Feral File in 2021, and she felt conflicted about it. The same day she launched Good Night, the single NFT whose owner she texts good night every night for as long as she lives, deliberately pairing a market debut with a meditation on permanence and death.
The surrogacy project
Her most intense recent work: she pursued becoming a surrogate and built an app giving the intended parents monitoring and control over everything she ate and did for nine months. The process ran through 2021 and 2022, and 2023 has been about documentation and artworks from the material, shown at the Australian Centre for Contemporary Art with a Mandeville Gallery exhibition in San Diego and a Feral File reproduction show ahead.
Upcoming and p5.js
She is in Femgen, an online show with VerticalCrypto exhibited at the Art Blocks event the following month, and wants performance work to reach people who are not already art audiences. Almost as an afterthought she mentions creating and leading p5.js, and MLow, who tinkers with p5 sketches himself, invites her into his fifty artist group chat with Coldie and Bryan Brinkman. She accepts.
In their words
“If you collect the piece, you have to actually visit it every day, or the piece will die.”
Lauren Lee McCarthy“The role of the artist will be to offer a different perspective that's not accessible to a machine.”
Lauren Lee McCarthy“I'm always excited about these unexpected uses and ways of pushing the technology and pushing the form.”
Lauren Lee McCarthy“When I collect things, it's really because I'm excited about the artists and their work, and not because I'm speculating about the value.”
Lauren Lee McCarthy“Everyone was like, the blockchain is the future and it will be here forever. And I was kind of like, what do we mean by forever, and after I'm dead, do I care?”
Lauren Lee McCarthyCite this conversation
Lauren Lee McCarthy in conversation with MLow, "MLow X Lauren Lee McCarthy," The MLow Show, 5 Sep 2023. https://show.mlow.xyz/e/2023-09-05-mlow-x-lauren-lee-mccarthy.html. Quoted from a machine transcript.
Quotations come from machine transcripts. Check wording against the audio before republishing.