Link: http://lauren-mccarthy.com/The-Changing-Room

This project is named The Changing Room, which is a smart home controlling your feelings and cares your emotions. The Changing Room is intended to make everyone to feel the emotion as intensely as possible. As you enter the main space, you will be asked the following question, “Do you want to feel?”, and you can select the emotion that you want to experience. The selected emotion will be evoked in the second floor through a series of positions and contortions of your body. After this, you will be picking a sound or voice, and instructed to adapt yourself to “share your feelings”, “calm down”, or “express more joy” according to the selected sound. I found this project interesting because, in this custom software installation, participants are able to feel different kind of emotion, such as fear or confusion, and leave with a sense of curiosity. Because of the technology, performance or exhibition can be more computational, and participants can enjoy more interaction and involvement with the environment.

I found Lauren McCarthy’s research on relationships through surveillance to be very interesting, taking a somewhat unusual spin on the hashtag “#caughtonNestCam” publicized by Nest Labs, the company behind the home surveillance system Nest. McCarthy and her colleague Kyle McDonald conducted an experiment where they would observe each other solely through a surveillance system similar to Nest, but when one would surveil the other, that surveiller would be recorded. I found this experiment to be unique in how it made the surveiller feel very self-aware of themselves while monitoring the other, while adding a strongly “human” element to the surveillance. Many would say that surveillance feels very “alien” and impersonal in a way, but as McCarthy puts it, knowing what the significant other is doing is a large factor in any relationship.

Lauren McCarthy created the app Follower as a step forward on how much people value their digital followers on social media platforms. We see our followers are part of a wide social circle that is in the know of whatever we’re doing but without the need to actual communication beyond more than a short comment or “like.” Since there’s this disconnect between online following trends, Lauren McCarthy wanted to see if anyone wanted a real life follower that simply observes what they are doing throughout the day. Today, we put a lot of worth in having as many people as possible to virtually feel connected to, to feel as if someone is interested in our lives, so Lauren McCarthy provides this service as more of a test to determine if subscribers in reality are more satisfying to this need. This is a push of personal surveillance, yet it brings up the matter that even though we’re so invested in maintaining our privacy from government surveillance, businesses collecting data, and such, we’re still eager to post whatever we want from our lives for the need to be acknowledged and approved on a screen. This app seems quite satirical of today’s powerful usage of internet connection by bringing back to reality.

This project that McCarthy invented is a smart wearable device. It can detect your emotion and heartbeat when you meet people and tell you who could be your friends. This device is definitely innovative. It helps people to cut the meaningless social time and make it more effective and accurate to make friends. It really can save us some time so that we can use those time to do other things. This device is a perfect example of combining physical and psychological function.

Lauren McCarthy | the 2017 Gray Area Festival

Project: Follower 

Follower is a service that provides real-life follower for a day and in order to be followed you answer two questions: why should you be followed? and why should someone follow you? If your answer gets selected, you would get a picture at the end of the day took during the day by your follower, Lauren. One of the answers that really got to me was when one person said that they believe their life has more of a online importance than real life. Having people following them would help them shit their presence from the online world to the real world. I feel like this answer is relatable to a lot of us. In this digital world, we loses a lot of the real life connections, and are only left with intangible links like social media. Even though I think having a real life follower is a little creepy, it’s a good idea that can actually make people be more connected in real life. I thought it’s interesting how Lauren McCarthy plays with the idea of how we hate surveillance, but we also want to be seen.

Eating Pizza Time

The pizza gets bitten every second, every minute another slice of pepperoni appears on the pizza, and every hour, the pepperoni should change color.

 

 

https://www.openprocessing.org/sketch/609765

My project is a frog eating flies. There are 60 flies on the screen that represent minutes, and every minute one fly would be eaten (disappear). There are 24 lotus leaves and every hour the frog will jump to the next lotus leaf. The background changes every 10 seconds. 

 

www.openprocessing.org/sketch/609746

The idea of this clock was to read out the time as a sentence instead of as numbers. The clock is made up of a grid of different words used to describe time, and different words light up to read the time.