With Lauren Lee McCarthy

I work with a lot of different media; performance is at the core of my practice, but I also work with software, film, installation, text, sound, objects, et cetera. I’m interested in art that takes unexpected forms and exists in media that maybe you didn’t realize could be a medium for art.

The focus of my work is how we connect or interact as people, which is shaped by the technology and systems we build around ourselves particularly as our lives become increasingly technologically based. While some of my work is not necessarily overtly technologically oriented, it is responding to the conditions of being a human right now, which implicitly engages with technology.

For the first residency with Eyebeam, I collaborated with Kyle McDonald on a project called pplkpr , which was engaged with lifelogging and device tracking. The question we posed was: what if an app optimized social relationships, measuring and analyzing the emotional impact that each person had on you as you went about your day, and then blocked certain contacts or auto-messaging people to keep relationships going? The most recent Eyebeam fellowship during the pandemic involved a collaboration with Grace Lee and Tony Patrick called Beyond the Breakdown . We wondered how we might imagine the world we want to see in this crisis moment and made a scripted AI-driven experience that brought people together online.

There was a browser-based web application that people could join in real time and the AI would drive the experience and facilitate world-building conversations between the participants.

I moved to New York in 2013 for the residency, and Eyebeam provided me with an instant network and community—many direct and indirect collaborations, projects, and community spaces came out of that for me. One person I met through Eyebeam is Taeyoon Choi, who was a resident before I was there, and we’ve since become close friends and collaborators and worked together in many different capacities.

I think artists can lead us to questions that haven’t crossed our minds or that maybe we were not quite ready to take on. Art gives us space to sit and grapple with these questions in all of their complexities as opposed to the way we normally experience things online, in which we are asked to respond immediately with, for example, an opinion like this, download this, agree to this. Beyond asking questions, I think artists can propose possibilities and alternatives, and by just imagining them, they can begin to become real.