router.gallery

009 Advance - Stay put / idle

VERNISSAGE: 16 January 2021 16:00 — 20:00 location: panke.gallery
opening times: 16 January 2021
location: panke.gallery
title: Advance - Stay put / idle
date: 2021
artist Lauren Lee McCarthy
curated by Noemi Garay

Context

As part of transmediale & CTM Vorspiel 2021, the router.gallery is presenting Advance – Stay put / idle, an exhibition featuring two works by digital media artist Lauren Lee McCarthy. Both of Lauren’s works, Later Date (2020) and Social Turkers (2013), are about desire for social interaction, intimacy and agency and the potential role of digital communication technologies as their facilitator.

Social Turkers (2013) In her performance Social Turkers, Lauren live streams a number of dates employing Amazon Mechanical Turk - a “crowdsourcing marketplace,“ used to outsource tasks to a distributed workforce who can perform the assignments virtually. The artist lets the Mechanical Turks make decisions on her behalf and guide her through the encounters.

Later Date (2020) Later Date is a highly topical work on the desire for - the indefinitely postponed possibility of - physical social interaction in times of the pandemic. Later Date is a work in two parts: the router.gallery is showing the first part, a documentation of plans made between the artist and various participants. The second part will take place on an agreed upon later date, when both parties will receive email requests to meet and enact the script. Visitors of the router.gallery will be asked to plan their own future Later Date.

While the potential for intimacy and physicality in Social Turkers is overtly apparent, it is at the same time meditated, enabled and interrupted by MTurk. Later Date on the other hand is an emphatic deceleration of the omnipresent demand for communication by type of Zoom calls. Conversations in Later Date are reduced to a text only chat between two participants pursuing the need for intimacy – a format perfectly fit for the intimate experience enabled by the router.gallery.
In line with the CTM festival theme Transformation, the artist’s works are hybrids of on- and offline performances, as well as their documentation on the internet. As the router.gallery takes the web pages offline, it highlights them not only as documents created by the artist to make the original performance accessible, but as narrative works of art.


The exhibition takes place outside, in compliance with all applicable Corona protective regulations.
Please keep your distance.

Photo Credits: Lauren Lee McCarthy
Screenshot of laterdate.net with text "I think one day we will be able to go outside again"

artist:

Lauren Lee McCarthy (she/they) is an LA-based artist examining social relationships in the midst of surveillance, automation, and algorithmic living. She is the creator of p5.js, an open source platform for learning creative expression through code online, and Co-Director of the Processing Foundation. Lauren's work has been exhibited internationally, at places such as The Barbican Centre, Ars Electronica, Fotomuseum Winterthur, Haus der elektronischen Künste, SIGGRAPH, Onassis Cultural Center, IDFA DocLab, Science Gallery Dublin, Seoul Museum of Art. She has received numerous honors including a Creative Capital Award, Ars Electronica Golden Nica, Sundance Fellowship, Eyebeam Fellowship, and grants from the Knight Foundation, Mozilla Foundation, Google, and Rhizome. Lauren is an Associate Professor at UCLA Design Media Arts.