Live Data

Catalog Essay on Lauren Lee McCarthy’s Surrogate
For the Exhibition Data Relations
Australian Centre for Contemporary Art
10 December 2022 – 19 March 2023

This essay on Lauren Lee McCarthy’s project Surrogate was commissioned for the catalog of the Australian Centre for Contemporary Art exhibition, Data Relations.

From the essay:

“Which forms of intimacy remain thinkable in spaces of datafication? How is agency circumscribed by the protocols that govern those spaces? Is it possible to enact bodily autonomy within their algorithmic constraints? Or to pursue embodied connection or kinship within them? Will you be my imaginary baby?

These questions dot the landscape of Lauren Lee McCarthy’s Surrogate (2022–ongoing), a project of uncanny timeliness and unnerving poignancy presented as part of Data Relations at the Australian Centre for Contemporary Art (ACCA). Alternately described as a thought experiment and an extended role-playing exercise, the work invites participants to collectively imagine a scenario wherein the artist will perform as their surrogate and cede bodily control to them (the ‘parent’) for the duration of a fictive gestation period.