How is it that we feel connected to other people? Can these moments be retroactively induced, and if so, what is the code of intimacy? And how does it relate to digital code? Lauren Lee McCarthy deals with questions like these. Her practice has roots in the digital, and the artist’s performances and web-pieces reach far into the physical world. Five years ago, her web-based performances could be read as technological dystopia, but it wasn’t really that simple even then, as paranoia began to accompany her every move online. With culture wars on social media and the popularity of conspiracy theories, it became clear for the first time to the masses what power digital platforms have over world events. And as suddenly as we woke up to this world, its laws became the generally accepted truth.

Yet McCarthy has always alluded to something darker, something harder to understand. There is a fundamental dialectic in her work. Isn’t being watched also a kind of being part of a greater whole? Isn’t it also a form of closeness, albeit a simulated one? This is not an intuitive or easily digestible insight, but the world cannot simply be divided into bad technology and good, genuine human proximity, or whatever the cultural pessimistic juxtapositions are at the moment.

Questions of surveillance, for example, underlie McCarthy’s work Lauren. Here, the artist stages herself as a kind of human voice assistant who monitors and thereby controls all electronic aspects of the smart home. The uncanny can mean an alien presence in one’s home. We stare into other people’s private spaces, regularly and at least since 2020. The situation is already reminiscent of one of McCarthy’s works, and since the beginning of the pandemic, her works also react directly and intuitively to the situation.