Lauren Lee McCarthy - Beyond Automation

Lauren Lee McCarthy is an artist working across performance, code, and installation to explore how technology shapes intimacy, identity, and social behavior. She uses art to expose and reimagine power structures. Her practice centers on the concept of presence, examining how we inhabit digital and physical systems and how those systems in turn shape our sense of being together. As the creator of projects like LAUREN, Follower, and AUTO, and the founder of the open-source platform p5.js, Lauren Lee McCarthy continually blurs the line between human and machine, control and care.

Lauren Lee McCarthy is a 2024–26 Just Tech Fellow and was the 2022–23 Stanford Human Centered AI Artist in Residence. She has received grants and residencies from Creative Capital, United States Artists, LACMA Art+Tech Lab, Sundance, Eyebeam, Pioneer Works, Autodesk, and Ars Electronica, and her work is in the collection of the Whitney Museum of American Art.

In conversation with Anika Meier, Lauren Lee McCarthy reflects on art and code, the feminist politics of technology, and how connection and presence rather than automation might guide us toward more open, unpredictable futures. The interview takes place on the occasion of Art on Tezos: Berlin, where Lauren Lee McCarthy presents her networked performance AUTO Berlin in the exhibition The Bigger Your Pool, curated by Anika Meier.

Anika Meier: As someone who began working with creative coding and interactive systems at a time when both fields were heavily male-dominated, what were the main challenges you faced? How did these experiences shape the way you approach collaboration and pedagogy today?

Lauren Lee McCarthy: This dynamic was the reason I got into open-source software development. I believed that for us to have tools that supported a diverse range of creative expression, we needed different perspectives in the room. At first I found the environment hard to enter, but I was lucky to be invited to start the p5.js project by Casey Reas, Ben Fry, and Dan Shiffman at the Processing Foundation. That invitation, that opening of space, was very powerful, and I was committed to paying it forward by opening space for many others to be a part of its making.

Anika Meier: You co-founded p5.js, a tool that has since become a gateway for artists and educators worldwide. Looking back, how do you see its impact on democratizing creative technology and expanding who gets to participate in art and computation?

Lauren Lee McCarthy: From the earliest days, we held access and inclusion as core values that grounded all technical and design decisions. This work expanded to a wide range of efforts, including foreign language translation, making the software screen reader accessible for users with visual impairments and disabilities, creating a web editor and friendly error system to prioritize beginners, and designing curricula for people with limited access to technology and the arts.

Since I stepped back from the lead role in 2021, the project has been stewarded by Moira Turna, Evelyn Masso, Qianqian Ye, and Kit Kuksenok, and each of them has pushed it in exciting new directions. It’s inspiring to see the ways that the ideas of p5.js have evolved within the project and also shaped conversations in the broader art and code community.

Anika Meier: Your work often sits in conversation with artists who critically examine systems of power: from Hito Steyerl’s exploration of visibility and control to Trevor Paglen’s investigations of surveillance infrastructure. How do you see your practice in dialogue with that lineage, and are there artists, thinkers, or movements that have particularly influenced you?

Lauren Lee McCarthy: I see my work as part of a lineage that uses art to expose and reimagine power structures. Artists like Steyerl and Paglen map the external architectures of control; I try to move inside them, inhabiting the interfaces and scripts that govern our behavior. My influences range from early net artists who treated code as a social space, like JODI and Olia Lialina, to artists working with performance and surveillance like Julia Scher, Lynn Hershman, and Jill Magid.

Lauren Lee McCarthy, AUTO, 2025. Installation view at LACMA, Los Angeles. Image credit: Gabriel Noguez

Anika Meier: From LAUREN to Follower to AUTO, your works turn surveillance and automation into spaces of intimacy and self-awareness. How do you see your use of the body—your own and the audience’s—evolving across these projects?

Lauren Lee McCarthy: The body is an important aspect of my work, but I think the concept of “presence” is even more central. With works like LAUREN or Follower, the sense of my presence, whether distributed through a smart home system or physically trailing 10 meters behind, and the participant contributing their own presence, is what animates the piece. The performances are very physical, asking the audience to consider the body in different spaces, whether public or private, and the infrastructures around it.

In AUTO, the participants enter a vehicle, evoking a sense of visceral risk and movement. They are asked to sing, using their bodies to contribute to the functioning of the AUTO system.

Anika Meier: AUTO turns the fantasy of driverless freedom into a kind of performative trap: a ride powered by the passengers’ own voices. How did you arrive at this idea, and what does it reveal to you about autonomy in a world increasingly mediated by AI?

Lauren Lee McCarthy: The work grew out of an increasing feeling of being out of control. As technology and the world accelerate, I struggled to find a sense of grounding or agency. In AUTO, I decided to embrace this feeling and explore both the anxiety and the thrill of ceding control.

A key idea with AUTO is that one doesn’t simply ride in AUTO, the passengers become AUTO. Their voices become the engine of the vehicle, and the singing serves as a metaphor. It represents a communal moment, a coming together. Singing is often a tool for activism, organizing, and protest. However, the participants are being fed the words karaoke-style and one at a time. They don’t know what they are saying until it’s sung from their lips, as they become a fully automated system together. At any point, they could decide to reclaim control, but people almost always continue to follow the directions.

Anika Meier: In Berlin, during the four-day event Art on Tezos, you are debuting AUTO Berlin in the exhibition The Bigger Your Pool, curated by me. In AUTO Berlin, the experience becomes collective and networked. How does the transformation from a physical to a distributed, browser-based experience shift the meaning of participation, control, and presence in your work?

Lauren Lee McCarthy: AUTO is more than an individual vehicle. It can enter any vehicle or group of people and begin to move. Shifting the work into a networked performance suggests that the system can replicate across the internet, moving people in different locations with distributed coordination.

Anika Meier: Artists like Steyerl and Paglen have visualized the hidden architectures of power. Your work instead often performs within those systems: through code, social platforms, or AI interfaces. Why is performing from within the system meaningful to you?

Lauren Lee McCarthy: By inhabiting the system itself, I gain a deeper understanding of its complexity. I can feel the edges where my human impulses rub against something more mechanical. In situating myself inside the apparatus, I’m able to take it over to some extent, to infiltrate, to utilize the patterns of the system toward different goals. The outputs of this work question our assumptions as to how technology and people should behave.

Anika Meier: Your practice is often described as both critical and deeply empathetic. How does feminist thinking inform the way you frame intimacy, care, and agency in technological environments?

Lauren Lee McCarthy: I understand technology as relational rather than neutral. I believe care can be a form of resistance. Can we create systems that enable us to listen to each other, that make room for vulnerability? The intimacy in my work becomes a method for critical examination: by revealing how technologies touch us, we are able to question who they serve and what kinds of futures they enable.

Lauren Lee McCarthy, Good Night, 2021.

Anika Meier: You’ve witnessed the evolution of art and technology from the early days of social media art to the current AI boom. How has the discourse changed, and what do you think younger artists should remember from those earlier, perhaps more idealistic, years?

Lauren Lee McCarthy: There was a sense in the early days that the internet belonged to everyone. Artists felt free to build their own sites, make new tools, hack existing systems. Now technology has become more proprietary and more opaque. Despite this, we don’t need to buy the narrative fed to us by corporations that the technology is too complex for us to understand. Artists can and should reappropriate, misuse, subvert, invent, and reimagine. It’s the only way we might move toward a future we actually want to live in.

Anika Meier: As we move toward an increasingly automated and algorithmic world, what questions are you still asking as an artist? Where does your curiosity lead you next?

Lauren Lee McCarthy: The algorithmic world is a mirror; it reflects back how we understand and see ourselves. I’m always looking for the glitches that break us out of the feedback loop. Can we look to our connection with other humans and our environment to create a future that feels open and unexpected rather than automated and inevitable?

About the artist

Lauren McCarthy is an artist exploring social relationships in an age of automation and surveillance. Her work has been supported by Creative Capital, United States Artists, LACMA Art+Tech Lab, Sundance, Eyebeam, Pioneer Works, Autodesk, and Ars Electronica, and is included in the Whitney Museum of American Art collection. Her project SOMEONE won the Ars Electronica Golden Nica and the Japan Media Arts Social Impact Award; LAUREN won the IDFA DocLab Award for Immersive Non-Fiction. Her work has been exhibited internationally at venues such as the Barbican Centre, Fotomuseum Winterthur and Seoul Museum of Art.Lauren is also the creator of p5.js, an open-source creative-coding platform used by millions, and she served on the Processing Foundation board to broaden access to art and technology. She is Professor in UCLA Design Media Arts and holds an MFA from UCLA plus BS degrees in Computer Science and Art & Design from MIT.

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About the author

Anika Meier is a writer and curator specializing in digital art. She lives and works in Berlin, Germany, and teaches at the University of Applied Arts in Vienna (Class of UBERMORGEN, Department of Digital Art). She is the co-founder of The Second-Guess, a curatorial collective based in Berlin and Los Angeles that explores the relationship between humans and technology.
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Among others, she wrote columns for Monopol and Kunstforum, worked with CIRCA and Tezos on Marina Abramović‘s first NFT Drop, and with Herbert W. Franke on his NFT Relase MATH ART. She was on the curation board of Art Blocks, on the advisory board of Haus der Elektronischen Künste in Basel and built EXPANDED.ART.
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Her most recent curated exhibitions include The Second-Guess. Body Anxiety in the Age of AI at HeK Basel (Virtual), LeeMullican.PCX at FeralFile, Who Is Online? Game Art in the Age of Post-NFTism at HEK Basel (Virtual), Art NFT Linz at Francisco Carolinum in Linz, and Tribute to Herbert W. Franke (co-curated with Susanne Päch).

Her exhibitions have been written about, and her writing has been published in, among others, artnet, Hyperallergic, Monopol, Kunstforum, Spiegel, Tagesschau, and Right Click Save.

Anika on Substack

About the exhibition

The Bigger Your Pool
Curated by Anika Meier for The Second-Guess on the occasion of Art on Tezos: Berlin, 6–9 November 2025.
Exhibition on objkt.com

Art on Tezos: Berlin, November 6–9, 2025.

The Bigger Your Pool looks at how artists navigate the expanding economies of data that fuel artificial intelligence. In machine learning, a “pool” refers to the training data from which systems learn. The larger the pool, the more powerful the model, and the more distorted its reflection of the world can become. Scale promises intelligence, but it also amplifies error, bias, and noise.

The exhibition gathers artists who work with and against these conditions. Some feed AI with intimate or idiosyncratic archives to reclaim agency within systems built on mass data. Others manipulate networks from within, exposing how machine perception constructs meaning through repetition, omission, and pattern recognition. Across these practices, the pool becomes a site of tension between control and surrender, precision and confusion, authorship and automation.

The Bigger Your Pool invites viewers to consider how data shapes imagination, and what it means for us—as artists, as humans—to live and create within systems that remember everything but understand nothing.

The Second-Guess is a curatorial collective based in Berlin and Los Angeles that explores the relationship between humans and technology. Co-founded by Anika Meier and Margaret Murphy.

Artists: Lauren Lee McCarthy, Sougwen Chung, Kevin Abosch, Mario Klingemann, Mike Tyka, Boris Eldagsen, Terence Broad, Elisabeth Sweet, Jess Tucker, OONA, Mika Ben Amar, Marine Bléhaut, exonemo, Margaret Murphy, Merzmensch, Franziska Ostermann, Jurgen Ostarhild

Beyond AutomationLauren Lee McCarthy on Creating an Open Future Through Connection

Beyond Automation
Lauren Lee McCarthy on Creating an Open Future Through Connection