Lauren Lee McCarthy — the artist who created p5.js and has spent a decade making work about automation, intimacy, and being watched — opened a new exhibition in July that stages AI companionship as live human performance. Visitors are paired with a performer who plays the role of a personal AI assistant, available to help, watch, and anticipate, and the piece sits squarely in the territory McCarthy has mined since LAUREN, her 2017 work in which she became a human smart-home system for volunteers who let her monitor their houses.
Watch: Lauren McCarthy — Interview (p5.js Contributor’s Conference) (YouTube)
Making the hidden labor visible
McCarthy’s central move is substituting a person for the software and letting the discomfort do the talking. When a real human offers to dim your lights, remember your preferences, and quietly observe your routines, the frictionless convenience of a real assistant curdles into something you can feel — the surveillance, the dependency, the labor. The new show extends this to the companionship framing specifically: not just an assistant that acts, but one that relates, which is precisely the register the current wave of AI companion products is chasing.
The p5.js throughline
It’s easy to file McCarthy as a performance artist and forget she also built one of the most-used creative coding tools in the world. The two practices are the same practice: p5.js is infrastructure that makes coding accessible and legible, and her art makes the invisible systems around us legible in the same spirit. Both are arguments that the technologies shaping our lives should be things we can see into, question, and refuse — a stance that runs from a beginner’s first createCanvas() to a stranger deciding whether to let a human “AI” into their home.