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Lauren Lee McCarthy


Info︎

LAUREN works
  1. LAUREN
  2. SOMEONE
  3. LAUREN Portable
  4. Exhibition: You Can Say
  5. The Changing Room
  6. Waking Agents
  7. I.A. Suzie

Saliva works
  1. Exhibition: Bodily Autonomy (Saliva Bar)
  2. Saliva Retreat
  3. Saliva
  4. Testing

Surrogate works
  1. Surrogate
  2. Exhibition: Data Relations
  3. Exhibition: Reproduction Otherwise
  4. Surrogate Performance
  5. Womb Walk

Autonomous works
  1. Voice In My Head
  2. Driverless
  3. Unlearning Language
  4. 24h HOST
  5. Seeing Voices

Muted works
  1. Exhibition: I Heard Talking Is Dangerous
  2. Muted
  3. I heard TALKING IS DANGEROUS
  4. Good Night
  5. Good Morning
  6. What do you want me to say?
  7. Sleepover
  8. Later Date
  9. Appreciate You

Other recent works
  1. Follower
  2. Social Turkers
  3. Vibe Check
  4. I’m glad you asked
  5. Autoreply
  6. pplkpr
  7. us+

Teaching & pedagogy
  1. p5.js
  2. Open Source Software Toolkits for the Arts Report
  3. Web We Want (W3C TPAC)
  4. Smarter Home
  5. Network Media
  6. Performing User
  7. Senior Capstone
  8. Disability, Design, and the Web
  9. Interactivity
  10. Conversation & Computation
  11. Social Hacking
  12. Critical APIs
  13. Computational Media
  14. Introduction to Programming for the Visual Arts (Free online course)

Archive
  1. Beyond the Breakdown
  2. How We Act Together
  3. Wake Words
  4. Friend Crawl
  5. Welcomer
  6. M/WITM
  7. The Changing Room: Brisbane
  8. Social Soul
  9. You Can Say
  10. Tools for Improved Social Interacting
  11. Inactive Account Manager
  12. Facebook Mood Manipulator
  13. LOVEINT
  14. SCRIPT

Mark

MWITM (Man / Woman In The Middle)


Lauren Lee McCarthy and Kyle McDonald

In computer security a "man in the middle attack" is an attack where the attacker secretly relays and possibly alters the communication between two parties who believe they are directly communicating with each other. In this case, we set up a system to MITM attack our own relationship.

Instead of sending text messages to each other directly, all of our texts were intercepted by a server. On the server we each had an automated, scripted representation of ourselves handling the message, either the WITM or the MITM. The WITM and MITM had the ability to: modify a message as it is being sent or received, reply to a message instead of modifying or relaying it, and initiate new conversations without any actions from Lauren or Kyle. Through this process we hoped to sync our different communication styles and subvert our relationship to improve it. We used this system, updating the code for the MITM and WITM, for a period of six months. Over this period, the “authenticity” of the conversation became more ambiguous as we scripted in response to each other’s scripts.






This work was commissioned by Art Center Nabi for the Neotopia: Data and Humanity exhibition.