VOICE IN MY HEAD
Lauren Lee Mccarthy & Kyle Mcdonald
With the proliferation of generated content, AI now seeps constantly into our consciousness. What happens when it begins to intervene directly into your thoughts? Where the people you interact with, the things you do, are guided by an AI enhanced voice that speaks to you the way you’d like to be spoken to.
Voice In My Head is a software-based performance that explores the implications for AI (ChatGPT) to listen and intervene in your social experience in real-time, augmenting your personality. The piece begins with an onboarding session where you place a bud in your ear and the voice asks you to reflect on the inner voice you were born with. What if it could be more caring? Less obsessive?
Less judgmental? More helpful? What if you could change your inner monologue? As you respond to the onboarding questions, it clones the sound of your voice and uses it to speak to you. Then you go out into the world, as the voice follows along and offers commentary and direction.
The resulting performance calls into question how natural vs synthetic each person’s thoughts actually are. Do any of us have our own point of view?
Lauren Lee McCarthy is an artist examining social relationships in the midst of surveillance, automation, and algorithmic living. She creates performances inviting viewers to engage. To remote control her dates. To be followed. To welcome her in as their human smart home. To attend a party hosted by artificial intelligence. Lauren is the creator of p5.js, an open-source creative coding platform that prioritizes inclusion and access, and a Professor at UCLA Design Media Arts. She has been recognized as a United States Artist Fellow, Sundance Fellow, Eyebeam Fellow, LACMA Art+Tech Grantee, and Creative Capital Grantee, and her work is in the collection of the Whitney Museum of American Art.
Kyle McDonald is an artist working with code. He crafts interactive installations, sneaky interventions, playful websites, workshops, andtoolkits for other artists working with code. Exploring possibilities of new technologies: to understand how they affect society, to misuse them, and build alternative futures; aiming to share a laugh, spark curiosity, create confusion, and share spaces with magical vibes. Working with machine learning, computer vision, social and surveillance tech spanning commercial and arts spaces. Previously adjunct professor at NYU’s ITP, member of F.A.T. Lab, community manager for openFrameworks, and artist in residence at STUDIO for Creative Inquiry at CMU, and YCAM in Japan.