Lauren Lee McCarthy’s Follower is a service that provides a real life follower for day. In order to be followed, you answer two questions, “Why do you want to be followed?” and “Why should someone follow you?” If you are selected, you are given an app to download, and you wait. You don't know when it will happen. The following lasts one day. At the end, you are left with one photo of you, taken by your Follower. The Follower stays just out of sight, but within your consciousness. Follower has been performed in San Francisco, NYC, Amsterdam, Zurich, Linz, and Seoul. Follower questions the relationship between attention and surveillance by mimicking our internet systems for seeing each other using physical idioms. Photo titles are excerpts from the application questions people answer in order to sign up to be followed, “Why do you want to be followed?” and “Why should someone follow you?”
Follower Short Film by Lauren Lee McCarthy
Lauren Lee McCarthy, Because I appreciate the absurd, Performance documentation from Follower, Luxembourg, Digital print, 2017, 6.5x11”.
For inquiries about purchasing work, please contact gallery.
Lauren Lee McCarthy, Because I’m Lonely, Performance documentation from Follower, Digital print, 2016, 6.5 x 11”.
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Lauren Lee McCarthy, I love all social experiences, Performance documentation from Follower, Luxembourg, Digital print, 2017, 6.5x11”.
For inquiries about purchasing work, please contact gallery.
Lauren Lee McCarthy, I want to gamble with someone unknown, Performance documentation from Follower, Luxembourg, Digital print, 2017, 6.5x11”
For inquiries about purchasing work, please contact gallery.
Lauren Lee McCarthy
Follower
2016-
Edition of 4 + 1 Artist Proof
Buying the work Follower consists of a certificate of authenticity, a single staging of the performance (lasting from dawn to dusk), and one photograph from that performance. Additional stagings can be commissioned in discussion with the artist.
Please contact gallery if you are interested in commissioning this work by Lauren Lee McCarthy.
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.
For more on Lauren Lee McCarthy and her work, click here.