Let me into your home: artist Lauren McCarthy on becoming Alexa for a day
Posted by The Editor on May 14, 2019 12:10 pm
Tags: Art, Art and design, Artificial intelligence (AI), Barbican, Computing, Consciousness, Crowdsourcing, Culture, Exhibitions, Health & wellbeing, Installation, Life and style, Neuroscience, Psychology, Silicon Valley, Smart homes, Society, Work-life balance
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She livestreams her dates, once became a real-life Alexa and built a light that dims in boring company. As AI: More Than Human opens at the Barbican, meet an artist for the tech age
In a gallery in downtown Manhattan, people are huddling around four laptops, taking turns to control the apartments of 14 complete strangers. They watch via live video feeds, and respond whenever the residents ask “Someone” to help them. They switch the lights on and off, boil the kettle, put some music on – whatever they can do to oblige.
The project, called Someone, is the latest in a series exploring our ever more complicated relationship with technology. It’s by the American artist Lauren McCarthy and is a sort of outsourcing of Lauren, an earlier work in which she acted as a real-life Alexa, remotely watching over a home 24 hours a day, responding to its occupants’ questions and needs like a flesh and blood version of Amazon’s voice-operated virtual assistant.