laurenleemack
Overview
Lauren Lee McCarthy, known professionally on X as @laurenleemack, is a Los Angeles-based artist whose practice rigorously interrogates the intersections of technology, intimacy, and human agency in an era of pervasive automation and surveillance. As an associate professor at UCLA’s Department of Design Media Arts (currently on sabbatical) and co-director of Social Software, she bridges academic inquiry with experimental art-making, creating works that invite public participation in systems typically governed by algorithms or corporate control. Her background as the creator of p5.js, the widely used open-source JavaScript library for creative coding, underscores her commitment to democratizing access to technology while simultaneously critiquing its social implications. McCarthy’s oeuvre spans performance, software, installation, and video, consistently positioning the viewer or participant as both subject and co-creator in explorations of relational dynamics under technological mediation.
Born and raised in the United States, McCarthy has emerged as a leading voice in new media and socially engaged art over the past fifteen years. Her projects often unfold over extended durations, transforming everyday interactions—such as driving or exchanging bodily fluids—into sites of critical reflection. A 2024–26 Just Tech Fellow and MacDowell resident, she maintains an active studio practice that responds to contemporary anxieties around bodily autonomy, data extraction, and algorithmic governance. Through her dual roles as educator and artist, McCarthy fosters communities of practice that challenge the isolation often produced by digital systems, emphasizing instead collective experimentation and embodied knowledge.
Artistic Style & Medium
McCarthy’s artistic style is characterized by a precise, participatory minimalism that foregrounds process over polished spectacle. She frequently employs software and custom-built interfaces alongside physical installations, blending the digital and the corporeal in ways that reveal the seams of technological mediation. Her works often incorporate real-time data, audience interaction, and iterative documentation, resulting in pieces that evolve through public engagement rather than remaining static objects. Video and performance elements provide narrative framing, while installations—such as bars serving saliva samples or vehicles modified for autonomous testing—create immersive environments that demand active bodily involvement from viewers.
In terms of medium, McCarthy moves fluidly between code-based tools (leveraging her p5.js expertise), biological materials, and mechanical systems. She favors lo-fi aesthetics in high-tech contexts, such as handwritten scores for social software or DIY modifications to vehicles, to underscore the human labor and vulnerability beneath seemingly seamless technologies. This approach yields works that are at once clinical and tender, clinical in their examination of surveillance protocols yet tender in their invitation to shared vulnerability. Her style resists spectacle, instead cultivating quiet intensity through sustained encounters that linger in the participant’s memory and body.
Influences & Themes
McCarthy’s practice draws from a rich lineage of conceptual and performance artists who have probed technology’s impact on the body and social relations, including pioneers in new media such as those exploring cybernetics and relational aesthetics. Her engagement with algorithmic culture echoes critiques from scholars and artists addressing surveillance capitalism, while her emphasis on participation aligns with traditions of social practice art. Influences from feminist and queer theory inform her attention to bodily autonomy, particularly in projects that center reproductive and intimate exchanges traditionally policed by institutions.
Recurring themes include the erosion and reclamation of agency within automated systems, the commodification of personal data and biology, and the possibilities for resistance through collective action. Surveillance appears not as abstract threat but as lived experience, whether through apps that quantify friendships or vehicles that record passenger behavior. Intimacy and estrangement coexist in her work, highlighting how technologies promise connection yet often enforce isolation or extraction. These themes are explored with intellectual rigor and emotional resonance, inviting audiences to confront their complicity and imagine alternatives.
Notable Works & Exhibitions
Among McCarthy’s most significant projects is pplkpr (2014–ongoing, with Kyle McDonald), an app that tracks, analyzes, and algorithmically manages the user’s relationships, exposing the absurdity and invasiveness of quantified social life. Surrogate (2022–present) extends this inquiry into reproductive technologies through an extended performance in which McCarthy serves as a gestational surrogate, documenting the bureaucratic and emotional dimensions of bodily labor under medical surveillance. Saliva (2023–present) invites participants to exchange vials of saliva in a bar-like setting, transforming a biological substance into a medium for exploring trust, contamination, and biosurveillance. Her latest series, Auto Tune (2025–), involves the public development and test-driving of a custom autonomous vehicle, turning mobility into a collaborative performance that questions who controls the future of transportation.
These works have been featured in major exhibitions, including the landmark solo show Lauren Lee McCarthy: Bodily Autonomy at the Mandeville Art Gallery at UC San Diego (2025), which toured to the Phebe Conley Gallery at Fresno State. The exhibition paired Surrogate and Saliva with a new site-specific video collaboration with Casey Reas, drawing record attendance and sparking public discussions on autonomy. Earlier presentations include international venues such as the EMST – National Museum of Contemporary Art in Athens. McCarthy’s projects often extend beyond gallery walls through open calls, workshops, and digital platforms, ensuring their themes reach diverse publics.
Impact & Recognition
McCarthy’s influence extends far beyond the art world through her stewardship of p5.js, which has empowered generations of artists, designers, and students worldwide to engage critically with code. As a professor at UCLA DMA and co-director of Social Software, she has shaped curricula and public programs that integrate artistic inquiry with technological literacy, fostering a new generation attuned to the ethical dimensions of emerging media. Her fellowships—including the Just Tech Fellowship and residencies at MacDowell—affirm her stature among peers, while her exhibitions have garnered critical acclaim in outlets such as Hyperallergic and Unframed (LACMA), which praise her ability to make complex technological systems feel urgently personal.
Recognition also manifests in the participatory ripple effects of her projects: participants in Auto Tune test drives or Saliva exchanges report heightened awareness of surveillance in daily life, contributing to broader cultural conversations about consent and data sovereignty. By insisting on the persistence of humanity amid algorithmic optimization, McCarthy’s work offers both critique and hope, modeling artistic practice as a form of civic engagement. Her legacy lies in the communities she builds and the questions she refuses to let fade—questions that resonate ever more powerfully in an age of rapid technological change.