Lauren Lee McCarthy
LATER DATE, 2020
Custom software, website, performance, video
http://laterdate.net/
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Lauren Lee McCarthy, http://laterdate.net 2020.
I think one day we will be able to go outside again. Honestly, I am fantasizing about this day. Seeing you. Reaching out and touching. Breathing, talking, anything really. This is a performance in two parts. In the first, we will chat. We will imagine together our meeting. Where we’ll go, what we’ll say, what we’ll do.
This future script will be saved. One day, when we are allowed again, you will receive an email with this script and a request to meet as planned. This will be part two of the performance. The chat conversations have now taken place, and the in person meetings will take place when it becomes possible. For now, the piece can be experienced as a playback of the chat conversations: https://laterdate.net/plans. Music by Lullatone.
As we wait in the middle of everything I keep thinking about how “later” has taken on new importance. It has been elevated from that place to which we’d relegate anything that did not really concern us to a place where we’ll do everything. I’ve been having a series of online chats with people where we make plans for a “later date”, when we are able to go outside again. I’ve been fantasizing about these later dates. Being in the same space as other people. Reaching out and touching. Shared surfaces. Breathing, talking, anything really. It is a performance in two parts. In the first, we chat and imagine together our first meeting. Where will we go, what will we do, what will we say? This future plan gets saved as a sort of script. One day, when we are allowed out again, they’ll receive a request to meet and we’ll enact this script. This will be part two.
We are planning with each other while we are negotiating with the future. What season will it be? Will we be able to embrace? Will that place still exist? We talk about the first days when frantic decisions were being made, and each of our personal boundaries closing in as we began to feel unsafe with one another. We acknowledge the discomfort of trying to find a stable place in a situation we refuse to accept as normal. We make extremely specific plans, subject to change.
Our conversation is the opposite of a Zoom grid. It is one-to-one, slow, text-only. I call this piece a performance, but with the camera off, it feels like the first non-performance I have experienced in weeks. The interaction is about waiting instead of streaming. And in this lack of bandwidth, we are left space to imagine. The person on the other end, whose presence we are only certain of at brief moments when messages pop onscreen. The later with this person when we will meet in highest fidelity. The days and months that will unfold after this exchange.
-Lauren Lee McCarthy
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about the artist
Lauren Lee McCarthy is an LA-based artist examining social relationships in the midst of surveillance, automation, and algorithmic living. She is the creator of p5.js, an open source programming language with over 1.5 million users, for learning creative expression through code online. She is Co-Director of the Processing Foundation, a non-profit whose mission is to promote software literacy within the visual arts, and visual literacy within technology-related fields—and to make these fields accessible to diverse communities. She is an Associate Professor at UCLA Design Media Arts.
Lauren's work has been exhibited internationally, at places such as The Barbican Centre, Ars Electronica, Fotomuseum Winterthur, Haus der elektronischen Künste, SIGGRAPH, Onassis Cultural Center, IDFA DocLab, Science Gallery Dublin, Seoul Museum of Art, and the Japan Media Arts Festival, and she has worked on installations for the London Eye, the US Holocaust Memorial Museum, and the Lincoln Center for Performing Arts. She is a 2019 Creative Capital Grantee, ZERO1 Arts Incubator Resident, was a Sundance Institute Fellow, Eyebeam Resident, and has been in residency at CMU STUDIO for Creative Inquiry, Autodesk, NYU ITP, and Ars Electronica / QUT TRANSMIT³. She is the recipient of grants from the Knight Foundation, the Online News Association, Mozilla Foundation, Google AMI, Sundance Institute New Frontiers Labs, Turner Broadcasting, and Rhizome. She holds an MFA from UCLA and a BS Computer Science and BS Art and Design from MIT.