Lecture: Lauren McCarthy and Kyle McDonald

5:00pm Tuesday, 16 September 2014
Kresge Auditorium, CMU College of Fine Arts

In a unique double-presentation co-presented with the School of Art, new-media artists Lauren McCarthy and Kyle McDonald will share their individual and shared projects that explore new forms of interactivity and identity.

During August and September 2014, McCarthy and McDonald will be Warhol Foundation Artists-in-Residence at the Frank-Ratchye STUDIO for Creative Inquiry.

Lauren McCarthy is an artist and programmer based in Brooklyn, NY. She is adjunct faculty at RISD and NYU ITP, a researcher in residence at ITP, and recently a resident at 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.

Kyle McDonald works with sounds and codes, exploring translation, contextualization, and similarity. With a background in philosophy and computer science, he strives to integrate intricate processes and structures with accessible, playful realizations that often have a do-it-yourself, open-source aesthetic. He enjoys creatively subverting networked communication and computation, exploring glitch and embedded biases, and extending these concepts to reversal of everything from personal identity to work habits. Kyle is a member of F.A.T. Lab, community manager for openFrameworks, and an adjunct professor at the NYU ITP.

Social Turkers: Crowdsourced Relationships from Lauren McCarthy on Vimeo.

Face Substitution from Kyle McDonald on Vimeo.