weekly update: my future is a collaboration
posted 01/31
Busy with a few projects…
The first is a visualization project I’m working on with Casper. The goal is to collect and visualize what we perceive as being beautiful, in an attempt to make people more aware of their environment and the way they perceive it, and to better understand our experience of beauty.
The second is a performance experiment in which I allow my life to be collaboratively scripted, one day at a time over an extended period. Each day, a script for tomorrow complete with dialogue, setting, costume, and stage directions is created through a publicly accessible and editable wiki. At midnight, the script is closed for editing and it becomes the basis for my performance of my life the following day. I maintain an online journal recording the scripts and some video and photo documentation of each daily performance, along with my reflections on the day and the project as it evolves. This outcome of this project is pretty undetermined, and I’m not entirely sure why I’m doing it but I felt like I had to try. I do know I am interested in the relationship between life and performance, in the blending of fiction and reality, in the dynamics of control, in the idea of collaboratively determining the future, in the infinite possible actions that I often forget while choosing a limited repeated subset of them to actually engage in each day, and in the potential transformations or outcomes that could come out of this just by me or someone else deciding that they will.
Check out www.lauren-mccarthy.com/script for more info and to participate.
exhibiting at IxDA Interaction10 conference
posted 01/23
I will be exhibiting Tools for Improved Social Interacting at the IxDA Interaction10 conference art exhibition at the Savannah College of Art and Design, February 4-7. From the conference website: This interaction design-inspired art exhibition will explore the concept of interaction: between people, with tools, with technology.What is interaction about? Behavior? Response? Is it Conscious?
Deliberate? What does “interaction” mean?
weekly update: something
posted 01/23
After a really great weekend in Boston, I arrived in LA expecting sunshine, but instead found myself tripping into a deep puddle of rain, followed by a further stumble into a deep puddle of despair. The precipitation persisted but the bad feelings began to subside as new ideas began to take form, and my twice a day hour long Big Blue Bus rides were replaced by comfortable cruising in my new craigslist car.
Anyway, things I’m working on right now…
A couple silly objects for use when shit seems serious. More to come on that, but trying to just get them done real quick before I decide they’re too silly.
Working with artist Sara Wookey on a workshop at the Hammer called Performing Navigations exploring the idea as body as experience vehicle.
Just beginning a video/performance/living series around ideas of reality/fiction, transformation, acting, participation, control, mobile and collaborative technology? …something maybe.
Talking with Casper about a mobile visualization project, perception vs data… we’ll see.
I thought there was something else but I can’t remember what and re-reading this all seems like enough to keep me busy at least until the rain stops falling.
exhibiting at NC State College of Design Biennial Graduate Symposium
posted 01/21
I will be exhibiting Tools for Improved Social Interacting at the NC State College of Design Biennial Graduate Symposium on January 22-23, where the topic is “Design, Community & the Rhetoric of Authenticity”. The work will be part of an art/design exhibition around the theme of “Useful Ambiguity”.
http://www.ncsu.edu/graphicdesign/GradSymposium2010/
speaking in boston on friday
posted 01/12
Awesome Foundation for Arts and Sciences and dorkbot-boston Present:
Lauren McCarthy: Tools for Improved Social Interacting
Talk and Reception
FREE EVENT
Fri, Jan 15, 7-9PM
sprout – 339R Summer St, Somerville
Reception to follow at The Spirit Bar (2046 Mass Ave, Cambridge)
weekly update: and back
posted 01/09
break time overlooking empty rosarito beach in mexico (photos by jeff lieberman)
The winter quarter started this past week with high velocity as expected. I spent the break actually trying to take a break, hoping to come at this stuff with a slightly clearer head and a fresh feeling. So now I’m here and I’m excited for this quarter.
The three weeks of break were spent remembering and expanding on the experience of living with someone you have a strong connection with…the intimacy, the resonance, the dissonance, the feeling of creating something new, and the not knowing exactly what it is or might be.
It got me thinking about other kinds of connections that exist already, and the possibility for creating new kinds. Could the idea of a bond be pushed further, so that is it no longer two individual organisms, but two sharing one life, becoming some kind of superorganism? Could the tasks of living a single life be split between two people, and how could technology help with the split and the syncing?
Another experience I had over break was eating dinner in complete darkness at a restaurant called Opaque. It was really interesting how much the process of eating a meal is changed by a lack of vision. Suddenly, the other senses became intensely amplified…each smell, sound, texture, taste was a new experience to be perceived and savored. I wonder if two people could split the senses for one, what would happen to each person’s conception of the world around them, and what is necessary to communicate the sensory information between them?
It’s all very undefined still but I think a place to begin experimenting and hopefully something will begin to take shape…
In addition to my studio/indep study work, I’m also taking a psych seminar called metacognition, media arts theory seminar, and data and media arts.
reading: Dancing in the Streets: A History of Collective Joy (Ehrenreich), Metacognition (Dunlosky/Metcalf).