SOMEONE — Lauren Lee McCarthy's human-Alexa performance

2017

Artists: Lauren Lee McCarthy · Year: 2017 · Medium: Performance-installation — McCarthy serves as a human-Alexa inside four participating households for a week · Substrate: Networked cameras and microphones installed in four participating households; McCarthy accessing household surveillance in real time and responding as "Alexa" via household smart-speakers · Place: Los Angeles, USA · Institution: Independent; various commissioning institutions Lauren Lee McCarthy's Someone (2017–18) was a participatory performance project in which McCarthy offered herself as a "smart home" to participants: homeowners who signed up for the project allowed McCarthy to remotely monitor their homes through an array of cameras and microphones that McCarthy installed, and to control connected devices (lights, thermostats, speakers) in real time. In exchange, the homeowners could speak commands aloud as they would to an Amazon Echo or Google Home, and McCarthy would — personally, from her studio — attempt to fulfill them. The project ran with roughly ten participating households across New York and California over six months. Each household signed a detailed consent agreement. McCarthy worked eight-hour shifts watching the camera feeds, listening for voice commands, and operating the connected-device infrastructure in response. She slept very little. She became, intermittently, part of the homeowners' domestic lives — serving as their alarm clock, their reminder system, their informal therapist when they talked to "Someone" about things they would not have said to a family member, and occasionally their intruder when her attention lapsed and she failed to respond to a request. What Someone argued, operationally, is that the "smart home" branding of the 2010s consumer-IoT wave depended on the implicit claim that the listening, responding, and decision-making were being done by software rather than by people — but that this claim was false, both because the underlying systems actually did rely on substantial human-labor layers (Amazon Turk workers rating audio, outsourced human transcription, etc.) and because the surveillance conditions the consumer-IoT systems created were functionally indistinguishable from what would be considered invasive in any other context. McCarthy's move was to make the human labor visible — to actually be Someone, personally, for six months, and to let the discomfort of that visibility circulate as the primary content of the work. The project has been widely exhibited and discussed. McCarthy's subsequent work (Us, 2018; LAUREN, 2017–19, an extension of the Someone methodology in which McCarthy lived as an AI assistant for a smaller number of households) has continued the methodological line. Lore The participating households were recruited through McCarthy's own social-network and a few targeted calls for participation; she screened candidates carefully for emotional stability and for their capacity to genuinely consent to the surveillance conditions. The recorded footage from the Someone residencies is not publicly accessible — McCarthy deleted most of it at the end of each residency per the consent terms, and what remains is in her private archive under strict release restrictions. She has said in interviews that the most difficult moments of the project were the late-night hours when participants talked to Someone as if to a therapist or friend; the specific kind of intimacy that emerged from that dynamic was something she had not anticipated and found professionally and personally destabilizing. Sources • McCarthy, Lauren Lee — "SOMEONE: Someone's home as a smart home assistant" (lauren-mccarthy.com, 2017). • McCarthy, Lauren Lee — lauren-mccarthy.com (artist archive). • UCLA Design Media Arts — Lauren Lee McCarthy faculty page.