You, me and my computer

A Talk with Lauren McCarthy, artist and programmer

Can we use technology to help us be more human? To smile more, to touch and to listen to each other? What if a computer could make decisions about our social relationships better than we could ourselves? Would our interactions be improved by algorithmically determining what to do and say? What happens if we crowdsource our dating lives and actually find love? In this talk Lauren McCarthy attempts to understand these questions through an artistic practice involving hacking, design, and self-experimentation.

Lauren McCarthy is an artist and programmer based in Brooklyn, NY. She is full-time faculty at NYU ITP, a Berkman Center affilliate, and recently a resident at CMU STUDIO for Creative Inquiry and Eyebeam. Her work explores the structures and systems of social interactions, identity, and self-representation, and the potential for technology to mediate, manipulate, and evolve these interactions. She is fascinated by the slightly uncomfortable moments when patterns are shifted, expectations are broken, and participants become aware of the system. Her artwork has been shown in a variety of contexts, including the Conflux Festival, SIGGRAPH, LACMA, the Japan Media Arts Festival, Share Festival, File Festival, the WIRED Store, and probably to you without you knowing it at some point while interacting with her.

lauren-mccarthy.com / p5js.org / @laurmccarthy

Free entrance, be on time and link up: Facebook Meetup Twitter

Supported by Stiftung Polytechnische Gesellschaft Frankfurt am Main http://www.sptg.de/