Lauren McCarthy is an artist and open source software developer. Her practice consists of repeated attempts to hack her way out of herself, and into relationships with others, using software and hardware, feedback systems and sousveillance, scripts and performances, viral videos and internet interventions. This amounts to dating while a crowd of Amazon Mechanical Turk workers watch and direct, tethering herself to a stranger’s GPS data while physically following them all day, and performing as human host for an AI system that feeds instructions into her ear while she hosts 24-hour cocktail parties.
2018 was a blur of activity, and I’m grateful for the friends and relationships that helped me orient toward what’s important. As someone who draws few lines between art and everything else, I got to have many moments where art projects, relationships, and worlds collided in the best possible ways. Here’s one from UCLA Design Media Arts, where I teach, when students, coworkers, friends, and family awkwardly bounced around the Richard Serra sculpture in spandex body bags for David Leonard’s SEXFIGHT, which felt like exactly what we needed this year.
1.
Dearest Home
This year I was trying to understand home. I spent uninterrupted weeks staring into and remotely controlling the homes of strangers as a human smart home. Kyle Abraham’s Dearest Home gave me a different way of understanding.
2.
Excellentia, Mollitia, Victoria
I stood in an empty room in front of EJ Hill, who stood atop an athletic podium for every hour the Hammer Museum was open during the Made in LA biennial, after having run victory laps around six of the LA schools he attended from preschool to college. Running has always been my way of making a city into home; this one had me from the start.
3.
Boston Marathon
After moving to LA two years ago, I finally started to feel a sense of groundedness when I got to run the LA Marathon with my dad and brother this past March. The Boston Marathon is one that carries lots of feeling for me because it was the first marathon I ran when I was a college freshman, and I watched as the finish line was bombed in 2013 just days after I moved out of the city. During this year’s race, I followed the coverage of the horizontal rain and freezing temperatures that elevated their self-imposed struggle into something otherworldly. Women dropped out at rates far lower than men, eliciting theories that childbirth had given them a better tolerance for pain. But as one female finisher compared the two experiences, “I never blacked out during labor.” 🔥
4.
The Scorpion Gesture
Despite my deep interest in being home, I often find myself splattered between cities and timezones and strangers. At one of these moments, I stumbled into the Rubin Museum and discovered Chitra Ganesh’s The Scorpion Gesture series of animations responding to the figures of Padmasambhava, known as the Second Buddha, and Maitreya, the Future Buddha. I was reminded of how the unfamiliar can also be familiar.
5.
She Has Her Mother’s Laugh
After my dad switched from asking me when I’d have children to telling me to freeze my eggs, I started to look into it and fell deep into researching reproductive technologies. I was fascinated by all the logistical, emotional, and ethical intricacies involved, as a “three person baby” and the first gene-edited twins flashed across headlines. Carl Zimmer’s She Has Her Mother’s Laugh: The Powers, Perversions, and Potential of Heredity was pretty dry, but the questions it pointed to were not.
6.
Catalysis
And as we grapple with Elizabeth Warren’s DNA testing her Native American heritage, and cohorts of sperm donor siblings unintentionally reuniting via 23andme, Adrian Piper’s meditations on the constructed boundaries of identity seem more urgent than ever. I saw her retrospective A Synthesis of Intuitions, 1965–2016 three times, at MoMA and the Hammer. I will never get tired of the way she holds space and makes it into her own.
7.
Kan Xuan! Ai!
Art and China After 1989: Theater of the World at the Guggenheim reminded us there’s a lot happening outside our limited frame of reference, including some of the best performance art. One of my favorites from this show was Kan Xuan! Ai!, in which the artist runs through a subway station urgently calling out her own name, causing passersby to look around for the one she’s desperately seeking. Yes.
8.
On Hell
9.
Harano Sur
Reetu Sattar lifted off in Harano Sur (Lost Tune) at the Liverpool Biennial. The video work documented a performance in which Sattar brought together 33 musicians in Dhaka, using the droning harmonium to speak about the violence and social upheaval in Bangladesh amidst migration and globalisation. “We’re saying, ‘I belong, I stay, and I talk, so I’m here.’ That’s how I am. Take me or leave me.” I can’t get that wailing, reflective, powerful droning out of my head; it seemed to capture everything right now.
And in another way, this did, too.
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