about

overview

 

press

The Verge – OK, Cupid: giving your love life to Google Glass and the hive mind

Fast Company – Lauren McCarthy let the crowd control her date, and soon you can too

Huffington Post – Artificial Artificial Intelligence (And Flirting Via Committee)

The Creators Project – Artist Live Streams Her OkCupid Dates And Asks Complete Strangers To Determine Her Actions

PSFK – Artist streams her dates on Amazon’s Mechanical Turk

Hack a Day – Letting people on the Internet control your dating experience

 

concept

What if we could receive real-time feedback on our social interactions? Would unbiased third party monitors be better suited to interpret situations and make decisions for the parties involved? How might this help us become more aware in our relationships, and more open to unexpected possibilities?

I am developing a system like this for myself using Amazon Mechanical Turk. During a series of dates with new people I meet through the internet, I will discretely stream the interaction to the web using an iPhone app. Turk workers will be paid to watch the stream, interpret what is happening, and offer feedback as to what I should do or say next. This feedback will be communicated to me via text message.

Through this series of interaction experiments, I will refine the rules of the system — the type of feedback and rating the turkers provide, and the amount and frequency of their influence. I will also keep public logs of the responses of the turkers and my own reflections on what transpires during each interaction.

Coming soon: easy to use app for anyone to start crowdsourcing their own relationships! Stay tuned.

 

lauren mccarthy

I’m an artist and programmer. I’m interested in ways that technology can be used to augment, subvert, alter, mediate, and ultimately deepen social interaction. Can we create systems to break us out of our normal systems? A sort of bootstrapping? Can we use data collected from our daily experience and networks to identify patterns and inspire new ones? I want to make different tools that try to create these situations.

You can find more of my work at lauren-mccarthy.com, contact me at laurmccarthy@gmail.com.