IN MOTION

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.

but when will you start making serious things?

(photo by jeff lieberman)

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?

http://interaction.ixda.org/

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.

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/

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)

(more details…)

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).

Our end of quarter show was yesterday, and it went really well overall. There were some great projects, it’s really neat how completely different all the work is. I was happy with my review, there was some good feedback on the presentation and method of my work, some other directions and things to think about, and a number of different reads that people had when talking to them about it later. When I think about my work I generally just focus on the problems and unresolved aspects of it, and it was nice to take a break and step back and see it as a whole. It really feels like the beginning of something I can work on for a while (not the tools specifically, but the generally area of focus and methods). In general, I felt that the reviews were thoughtful, focused, and honest – I like that.

In other news, I just received a grant from the Awesome Foundation in Boston to complete this work and extend it by putting on a workshop with Dorkbot Boston in January. Participants will identify their own social interacting issues and then design and build their own training devices to affect their behavior. More than just a how to technical workshop, this will be a continued exploration of the ideas involved in the series. What expectations do we have of each other and of ourselves in social situations and how do we feel we fit into these? How is it unique to each individual?

I am really looking forward to taking this break and having some time to read and think without feeling like I need to constantly be making and producing. I’m excited to work on some new ideas!

thinking about: Just did a little identity creation for the Tools series. Now the devices will all have matching tags and labels on them.

For next quarter, I have a few things planned. I want to do a series of performances/experiments, exploring the possibilities of changing myself psychologically or mentally, using technology, and seeing how it affects me and those around me. I am thinking about the work of artists like Orlan and Stelarc, but I am more interested in making nonphysical or invisible changes. I met with Casey today, and he also reminded me of the work of Cindy Sherman and Lynn Hershman. I’m going to work with visiting professor/designer Gail Swanlund on the documentation and presentation of this series of experiments.

I also would like to work on a large project for the entire quarter in studio with Robert Israel, one that is a single entity and not a collection of many smaller parts. This is in direct conflict with the way I work best, which is with smaller experiments and iterations, evolving and building up over time to form a coherent larger project. While the other series will be like that, I want to force myself with this project to commit to an idea and stick with it for 10 weeks. So it will be two very different approaches to the same area of ideas.

I’m also taking a data visualization class with Victoria Vesna, a theory class with Erkki Huhtamo, and a psychology class about culture, brain, and development.

reading: Powers of Horror (Kristeva), Expressive Processing (Wardrip-Fruin)

Missed a few weeks, but catching up now…

thinking about: Working on two more Social Interacting Tools – one trains you to employ more body contact in your interactions (your ability to hear the world diminishes as body contact is lost), the other is an anti-daydreaming device that periodically reminds you to pay attention while engaged in conversation.

I keep swinging from the excited rush of intensity and challenge to the depressing depths of frustrated confusion and doubt. I am amazed at my ability to spend hours in deep contemplation over a single design decision, only to emerge with such a complex set of relations built around the choice in my head that any movement in any direction seems utterly inconceivable.

My professor has challenged me to embark on a large scale project, but I can barely make a one minute video without getting all twisted up. So this should be interesting. And maybe I need to just straight up fail in a big way so I get over it already.

I am looking forward to Thanksgiving in Boston to have a little change of environment and some space and time to reground and reorient.

“So reality is what I talk about with a third party. It can only be defined as a product of negotiation…Imagination seems like a prosthesis affixed to the real so as to produce more intercourse between interlocutors. So the goal of art is to reduce the mechanical share in us. Its aim is to destroy any a priori agreement about what is perceived.” (Bourriard)

reading: Power/Knowledge (Foucault), Purity and Danger (Douglas), Relational Aesthetics (Bourriaud), The Language of New Media (Manovich)

reading: Expressive Processing (Wardrip-Fruin), Understanding Media (McLuhan)

working on: a touching/talking training/exploring device, a series of comment card feedback exploration (more to come), a very unresolved idea about eye contact

thinking about: In the past three days the Happiness Hat has been featured on over 100 blogs, on TV, and the video has been viewed by more than 140,000 people. This was much more of a response than expected, and in thinking about that and also the question of how art functions in the age of electronic reproduction posed by Peter Lunenfeld, the question of audience comes up for me. I think that the creation of technologies that allow instantaneous mass communication forces the artist to consider much more who her target audience(s) is, why, and how best to reach them. The experience of an artwork is no longer limited to the art community, there is now the possibility to reach any community, and choices must be made about the piece based on this decision. The documentation of the work also becomes a part of the piece as well, changing the meaning in some ways, but also offering the potential to add new elements ors layers of depth. Anyway, we have to write 500 words on this topic so there will be more thinking about that to come.

On another note, I’ve been hearing a lot lately from various professors, speakers, peers, etc about what art can not be…design, education, objective, scientific, informative, to name a few… I guess I believe, naively maybe, that anything has the potential to be art, so I’m now on a mission to see if I can make everything in my life into art, or at least blur the boundary between it all as much as possible. Perhaps then I will be able to find out for myself what art can not be.

Finally, I’ve just been feeling overwhelmed (though maybe overwhelmed is the wrong word) by questions lately. How easy is it to change your mood or someone else’s? What is the potential for feedback to change what we act, think and feel? Could we somehow use technology to train us to be more human? What does this mean? When is trying to push or change oneself to fit better into some model a good thing vs a bad thing? How is it that you can appear to fit well with everyone, yet feel like in some ways you really don’t? Would using negative pain feedback to train this positive behavior cancel out the pleasure caused by smiling? Or could it somehow raise the threshold of the whole system, stimulating us to feel everything more intensely? Is it important to be happy or feel good rather than bad? Does feeling good all the time/refusing to let problems or less than ideal situations frustrate or upset you limit your desire to make a change? How often does the appearance we project misrepresent what we are really thinking and feeling? In what ways are expectations, patterns, and appearances positive and useful? In what ways are they negative or limiting? How do you choose your audience? What do you compromise in the choosing? How can you make a piece work on multiple levels? What qualities does a work need to have for it to grow and evolve for you in the production of it? What questions can you ask that provoke more questions?

main goal this week: really get moving on production on this touching thing, but also it still feels fuzzy and not quite right… also figure out the topic for the paper for Peter’s class

The Happiness Hat is a wearable device that detects if you’re smiling and provides pain feedback if you’re not. An enclosed bend sensor attaches to the cheek and measures smile size, a servo motor moves a metal spike into the head inversely proportional to the degree of smile. Through repeated use of this conditioning device you can train your brain to smile all the time. This is the first in a series of Tools for Improved Social Interacting.

www.lauren-mccarthy.com/happinesshat

(more…)

reading: Society of the Spectacle (Debord), Expressive Processing (Wardrip-Fruin)

working on: happiness hat, finishing, documentation

thinking about: Michael Kontopolous/Casey Reas pointed me toward the work of Anthony Dunne and Fiona Raby, Noam Toran, their term “critical design”, and some of the other work that came out of Royal College of Art and Chris Csikszentmihalyi’s Computing Culture group at the Media Lab…had seen most of this before, but cool stuff.

Casey also brought up a good point about use, refinement, and documentation. Just because a project is “made” doesn’t necessarily mean it’s “finished”. The way it is actually used, the degree to which it is refined, and the way it is represented through documentation and display are parts of the piece and can add context and depth. Important to think explicitly about the choices I’m making with these things and what they mean.

So basically, what I’ve been thinking of lately are various ways my projects could function as a way to reconcile my behavior and the general discomfort I often feel in many social situations with society’s expectations of “normal” interaction behavior…while also trying to question these expectations and their purposes. This could mean tools that help one adapt to fit in better with society, projects that attempt to mold the world to fit better around the individual, or maybe projects that attempt to change or question both…exploring altogether different ways of interacting. Thinking about a touch/conversation piece right now, more to come…

to do this week: finish up the happiness hat (for reals), start on this next project, think of another shorter series of experiments maybe, ooh and a hardcore software project would be really fun but I haven’t thought of anything along those lines really yet…also start thinking about the topic of my paper for my media history/theory class – roughly 10 pages on anything within this topic, could really help to think through what I want to work on and why… oh yeah and carve pumpkins and go trick or treating!

I’ve been meaning to do weekly updates, both for documentation purposes and to take a moment each week to reflect and summarize what I’m thinking about. it hasn’t happened until now, but hopefully it continues.

reading: Social Intelligence (Goleman), Society of the Spectacle (Debord), The Language of New Media (Manovich), Snap to Grid (Lunenfeld)

working on: happiness helmet (hat? headband? wearable…) – detects smile size and inflicts pain inversely proportional

thinking about: social neuroscience

amae – a Japanese word that has no English equivalent but Goleman describes it as “empathy that is taken for granted, and acted upon, without calling attention to itself.” He says, “Amae seems to take for granted a mutual priming of aprallel feelings and thoughts in people who are attuned. The unvoiced attitude is something like: if I feel it, so should you – and so I needn’t tell you what I want, feel, or need. You should be closely enough attuned to me to sense it and so to act on it without a word needed.”

projection vs empathy (and creating a feedback loop)

rejection triggering the same spot in the ACC as physical pain, perhaps suggesting that the pain center evolved the sensitivity to social rejection as an alarm signal to warn of potential banishment – and to prompt us to repair the threatened relationship, and another more recent study relating the brain processing of a lot of social experiences to physical ones (Lieberman & Eisenberger)

microexpressions – and eckhart’s training software

dyssemia – a deficit in reading – and so acting on – the nonverbal signs that guide smooth interactions

Goleman: social intelligence = social awareness (primal empathy, attunement, empathic accuracy, social cognition) + social facility (synchrony, self-presentation, influence, concern)

I-you vs I-it relationships (the utility of each, the switch between, the murky blend space)

those cards on the big blue buses where, if your driver was particularly friendly, you can let him know

to do this week: finish the wearable, start another project, think about idea for kinetic piece

part of a series of possible Tools for Improved Social-Interacting
here’s a pdf version

first in a series of possible Tools for Improved Social-Interacting
here’s a pdf

there is absolutely no inevitability as long as there is a willingness to contemplate what is happening [mcluhan]

In related news, I recently read Understanding Comics by Scott McCloud, and had an epiphany! I now have a new understanding and appreciation of comics as a really awesome art form.

epiph·a·ny \i-ˈpi-fə-nē\
noun
(1) a usually sudden manifestation or perception of the essential nature or meaning of something (2) : an intuitive grasp of reality through something (as an event) usually simple and striking (3) : an illuminating discovery, realization, or disclosure b : a revealing scene or moment


in·ter·ac·tion \ˌin-tər-ˈak-shən\
noun
mutual or reciprocal action or influence