“Hello lovely list,
I need your help with some surveillance and you need help paying off your student loans, so lets make a deal. Here is your target:”
“For every photo of Jason Yung you send me between now and next Wednesday (11/14) at 3pm, I will pay you $0.01.
If you can manage to get a photo of him right after you've given him a compliment, each of those photos is worth $0.50. (see below)
This offer stands until either Wednesday at 3pm or until I receive $25 worth of photos.
You can email me the photos or email me to meet up for a download, at which point we can arrange preferred payment method.
Feel free to contact me off list with any questions/comments, thanks!
August”
Reading Responses
Lauren McCarthy — Follower
I’m obsessed with this. I’m obsessed with Lauren McCarthy. This is brilliant.
The pictures absolutely blow me away — I’m a big fan of mundane, slice-of-life, everyday sort of art where one infinitesimally small part of someones life manages to get across something universal not just of the subject, but of what it means to be a human. I love that any of these pictures could have been taken of some rando on the street, but knowing the context that the person was followed for a whole day and this was the moment captured — that was the part that made me fall in love with this. It really makes you think, there are so many days that you wish could be recorded and re-lived, and so many days that are totally uneventful and that you’ll never remember. If one picture was taken during your life, which day would it fall upon? It reminds me of one of my favorite quotes — from a poem by Mary Ruefle: “What book will you be reading when you die? If it’s good, you’ll never finish. If it’s bad, what a shame.” Ugh.
Mediated Social Touch
This isn’t entirely relevant, but the first thing I was reminded of was a hilarious experience I saw at Indiecade 2016 in Los Angeles: Kitty VR. Kitty VR was a VR massage experience where you would lie down with a VR headset on and watch as kittens massaged you in virtual space. In physical space, however, the person running the experience put on kitten gloves and mimicked the kittens by massaging the same spot the kittens were virtually touching. It was such a funny thing to watch out-of-context, and I never found out if the person experiencing it was told they were going to be massaged in real life before it happened.
Debugging the Empathy Machine
Using VR as a tool to create empathy is the most exciting application of the technology, in my opinion, so it’s interesting to hear some more perspectives on this here. It’s interesting to hear the term “embodiment machine” though also, because I guess I never really made a connection between my desire to use VR to show someone what it’s like to live as someone else and my fascination with digital avatars as a way to live as someone else who is represented differently physically. I wonder how a VR short about what it’s like to live as a woman being catcalled would be different if the participant were a man who catcalls vs a trans woman who is at the beginning of her transition.
Twin Peaks and the Sublimity of Awkwardness
I feel very validated that it says people with too much empathy can’t enjoy cringe comedy, because I’ve always felt physically ill trying to watch those kind of shows haha.