Lauren Lee Mc Carthy and Kyle Mac Donald. pplkpr

Lauren Lee McCarthy & Kyle McDonald
pplkpr, 2015
Software, single channel video, colour, sound, 1΄
Courtesy of the artists

Pplkpr is an app created by Lauren Lee McCarthy and Kyle McDonald, an artist who works with code, that tracks, analyses and auto-manages your relationships. It uses a smartwatch to monitor the user’s physical and emotional response as they interact with the people around them. The application processes the data and makes suggestions on whom to reject and whom to keep (its name derives from the consonants of the phrase “people keeper”), in order to optimise their social, emotional and professional life. The work is presented in the form of a video, a website and a fully functional application for i-Phone. It is both a parody of the techno-solutionism of startup culture, the belief, in other words, that technology can solve everything, and a critique on the mediation of our emotional life by online applications.

Lauren Lee McCarthy works with performance, software, internet, film, photography, and installation to examine social relationships in the era of surveillance, automation, and algorithmic living. She explores the ways we are taught to interact with algorithms, and how this shapes the way we interact with each other. Central to her work is a critique of the simultaneous technological and social systems we’re building around ourselves.

Kyle McDonald is an artist working with code. He crafts interactive installations, sneaky interventions, playful websites, workshops, and toolkits for other artists working with code. His work explores the possibilities of new technologies not only in order to understand how they affect society, but also to misuse them, and build alternative futures. They work both autonomously and together.

Biographies

Lauren Lee McCarthy graduated from MIT with a BS in Computer Science and a BS in Art and Design. Lauren Lee McCarthy She is the creator of p5.js, and Co-Director of the Processing Foundation. Lauren’s work has been exhibited internationally, at places such as The Barbican Centre, London,  Ars Electronica, Linz, Fotomuseum Winterthur, Haus der Eelektronischen Künste, Basel, ZKM Karlsruhe, IDFA DocLab, Amsterdam, Science Gallery Dublin, Seoul Museum of Art, among many others. She has received numerous honours including a Creative Capital Award, Sundance Fellowship, Eyebeam Residency, and grants from the Knight Foundation, Mozilla Foundation, Google, and Rhizome. Lauren is an Associate Professor at UCLA Design Media Arts.

https://lauren-mccarthy.com

Kyle McDonald is an LA-based media artist. Previously adjunct professor at New York University’s Interactive Telecommunications Program (ITP), a member of Free Art and Technology Lab (F.A.T.), community manager for openFrameworks, and artist in residence at STUDIO for Creative Inquiry at Carnegie Mellon University, and Yamaguchi Center for Arts and Media (YCAM) in Japan. His work has been commissioned and shown internationally, including at: the V&A Museum, London, NTT Inter Communication Center (NTT ICC), Tokyo, Ars Electronica, Linz,  Sonar, Barcelona,  and Eyebeam, New York.

https://kylemcdonald.net

 

 

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