#30 - Artist Lauren McCarthy Will Be Your Home's Brain

**Craig Cannon** (0:00)
Hey, this is Craig Cannon, and you're listening to Y Combinator's podcast. Today's episode is with Lauren McCarthy. She's a digital artist and assistant professor at UCLA. I interviewed Lauren to talk to her about her new project, which is called Lauren, and it's basically her as the operating system behind all of your smart home devices.
So the way it works is you can sign up at getlauren.com, and for a select group of the people that sign up, Lauren will go to your home, set up the devices, and then monitor it 24 seven. So when you're awake, she's awake. When you're sleeping, she's sleeping. And all you have to do is say, hey, Lauren, and she'll do whatever an Amazon Alexa might do and possibly more as she tries to anticipate your needs. So if you want to sign up, you can check out getlauren.com. And if you want to read the transcript or watch the video, that's at blog.ycombinator.com. All right, here we go.
So today we have Lauren McCarthy. She is an artist based in LA. Could you give us a quick background?

**Lauren McCarthy** (0:57)
I'm an artist based in LA. I'm an assistant professor here at UCLA Design Media Arts.
But my art is basically thinking about what are the systems we use to be a person and interact with other people, and will technology save all of our problems or cause many more?

**Craig Cannon** (1:17)
Do you have an answer?
So, at the footer of your website on your About page, you wrote, I make art about what confuses me. Is that still true? Or is your website old?

**Lauren McCarthy** (1:31)
Oh, yeah, no, it's definitely true. The main thing that confuses me is just people.
All of them. So, I make art about people and about the sort of expectations we have of each other or the rituals and the patterns and the strange things we do when we're together or alone.

**Craig Cannon** (1:56)
And so, I guess to give people some context, can you just like reference one of your projects that is about people?

**Lauren McCarthy** (2:02)
Sure, yeah.
So, maybe to give an example, I did a project called Social Turkers a few years ago, and I was trying to see if I could fix my non-existent dating life. So, I made this system where I went on a series of blind dates with people that I met on the internet, and then I sort of discreetly streamed the video of the date to the web, and then I paid people through a service called Amazon Mechanical Turk small amounts of money to watch the date and try and give me instructions for what to say or do to see if they might be better at kind of coaching me or directing me through this date.

**Craig Cannon** (2:45)
And was that successful for you?

**Lauren McCarthy** (2:49)
Yeah, to some extent.
Maybe less successful than I had hoped, but also less successful than I had feared.
Yeah, the thing that it did really was make, I guess one thing I'm always trying to do without getting too philosophical here is understand like what are these limits we put on ourselves? And so for me to get these instructions, oh yeah, so they would come as like text messages and I have to do them or say them immediately. And so just having to do these things and not being totally in control felt really uncomfortable at first, but then also like started to become really natural. But the thing it made me realize was like I could say or do things that I felt like, oh, that's not me or that's totally weird of me to do. And then like the date would not, you know, act like it was such a strange thing to say or do. And so like the sky didn't fall. And so I realized what a narrow box I normally hold my idea of myself in. And so what that project was really successful in doing was just getting me to like kind of loosen up my identity, I guess, in some way.

**Craig Cannon** (4:01)
They had no idea that this was going on while you were doing it?

**Lauren McCarthy** (4:04)
They didn't. And that was part, you know, I didn't, I started out with these where I would tell them at the beginning of the date. Because that, you know, it wasn't supposed to be like this secret thing. But the problem was that the whole date would be just talking about the project and about the issues around it and surveillance and art, which was great, but it didn't feel like a first date then. It was just them quizzing me about my art practice. And so I switched to like telling them at the end or after the fact just to try and get a more, get this feeling that like this is this thing we all do, we don't talk about it.