Lauren Lee McCarthy

Lauren Lee McCarthy is an artist who examines how technology shapes social relationships, intimacy and everyday life. She is Professor of Design Media Arts at UCLA, where she co-directs the Social Software Lab with Casey Reas, and she is the creator of p5.js, the open source creative coding platform that has introduced millions of people to programming through art. Her practice runs on a simple, unsettling move: she inserts herself where software usually sits. For LAUREN she became a human Amazon Alexa, watching over strangers' homes and controlling their devices. For SOMEONE she staged a human smart home command center, and the work won the Ars Electronica Golden Nica and the Japan Media Arts Social Impact Award. LAUREN received the IDFA DocLab Award for Immersive Non-Fiction. She has held fellowships from United States Artists, Creative Capital and Sundance, was the 2022 to 2023 Stanford HAI artist in residence, and her work sits in the collections of the Whitney Museum, LACMA, ZKM and Francisco Carolinum. Later works like Surrogate, Saliva and Voice In My Head keep pushing at consent, care and control in an algorithmic world.

Performance, software, installation and film about surveillance, automation and intimacy. She often performs the role of a machine herself, as in LAUREN and SOMEONE, or invites audiences into systems that watch them, as in Unlearning Language and Vibe Check. Named works include Follower, Surrogate, Saliva, Later Date and Voice In My Head. She also created and stewards p5.js.

• Creator of p5.js
• LAUREN (2017), becoming a human Amazon Alexa
• SOMEONE (2019), Ars Electronica Golden Nica winner
• Follower (2016)
• Surrogate (2022)
• Professor of Design Media Arts at UCLA

On the show