Man: My choice to work so heavily with text and language recently wasn’t a conscious one.

Your whole self can never exist in a single space. It doesn’t mean I’m being fake with them it’s just kind of how socializing works.

Even offline, when I’m with different people, I’m different depending on the context. These platforms make it impossible to represent your full multidimensional self. It’s a hybrid performance of me as both a person and as an artist.

That’s not to say that what I post isn’t meaningful to me, but I view everything I upload as a contribution to the idea of who I am on the Internet. I really see everything I share online as a performance. If you’re putting something on the Internet for the public you are always mediating, always thinking of the audience who is going to see it. But over time, I realized that that is functionally impossible. I always felt like I wanted to be as real as possible online because that seemed moral and good. People criticize celebrities for being inauthentic or seeming fake online. When people candidly talk about the right way to post, often the word authenticity comes up. As I mentioned, I used to feel like I was constantly chasing this idea of authenticity online. It really prompted me to think of what might be possible in my own work. This project felt radically different from other work I had previously seen or conceptualized as art that uses software as a medium. To me, this project developed an amazing exploration of the language we use and the surveillance that happens on social media all within the context of an application McCarthy programmed. A lot of my work is about social media and the absurdity of the ways we interact online. At the end of the day, the person would receive a photo that had been taken of them without them knowing. Once a person signed up, they would share their location and a person from the app (usually Lauren) would follow them without their knowledge. Around that time, she had made a piece called FOLLOWER, an app-based service that allowed someone to sign up to be followed around for a day. Her art practice focuses on building programs and performances that explore social interaction. Man: In 2015, I met Lauren Lee McCarthy through her work leading p5.js.

Maya digital art