If you live in New York City, and have always wondered what it would feel like to have your own personal paparazzi for a day, now is your chance to find out. Lauren McCarthy, a Brooklyn-based digital artist, is bringing her performance art app—Follower—to New York, and is currently accepting applicants to be followed or to follow.
“On one hand there’s all this surveillance and it’s really beyond our control— who’s watching us, where is the data going—and I wanted to create something that inverted that, where instead you actually had control and you can request the surveillance,” said McCarthy of her motivation behind the project.
“I also thought that it’s weird how in one sense this surveillance is terrifying and pervasive, but on the other hand we have this desire to be seen and to be followed and see our follower count tick upwards and to even buy fake followers online.”
Users can apply to be followed at follower.today by filling out a brief questionnaire explaining their motivations. If selected, they will receive a link to an app which will alert them on the morning of their following. At the end of the day, the app will notify the user that their following has ended, and leave them with one photo of themselves taken by their follower.
If the whole concept of Follower seems a bit creepy, that’s not a mistake. McCarthy intended this project to be open-ended. Why are we so obsessed with having peers respond to our every action? Why have we become so comfortable with being constantly observed? How trusting should we be of others?
“It’s not that surveillance or following in general is a dangerous or negative thing, it depends so much on the relationship. Is it me, is it an unknown person, is it the government, did you ask for it, do you know its happening, is it inside your bedroom or in a public space?” McCarthy said. “It’s much more nuanced than just ‘surveillance: bad’ or ‘someone watching you: scary’ … imagining is what people do when they see the project; to imagine the possibilities, good or bad.”
McCarthy launched the app in San Francisco in January, and followed 15 people in one month. As of now, McCarthy is the only follower.
“The process of vetting someone would [involve] too much liability on my end. I didn’t want this to be creepy. It’s the guise of a service but I’m the only follower,” she said. “A lot of my artwork deals with my own social anxiety, so it was attractive: this idea of having a relationship with someone that I didn’t interact with. I just got to follow and be with them and not have to think about where to go or what to do, let them choose that for me.”
McCarthy said that the prevailing motivation for her subjects was what she had hoped coming into the project.
“Being themselves in a film or a story of themselves, something about someone watching them, gave them a feeling that we’re the center of a story even though we’re just people in the world,” she said.
The artist herself also has taken a lot away from the experience.
“The moment when I would first find the person was so exhilarating,” she said. “It was this surreal moment that this actually worked somehow. It was a feeling almost of being in a video game of some kind or a parallel universe, yet I’m just walking around the streets of San Francisco.”
McCarthy said that the New York project will start in a few weeks, and then she hopes to bring Follower to other cities.
“I’d been to San Francisco many times but it gave me a different perspective to see it through other people’s eyes,” she said. “I’d love to do it in other cities around the country or around the world, to live someone else’s life in that city.”
This article was written by Andrew Conrad from PSFK and was legally licensed through the NewsCred publisher network.
