interview by Doreen A. Ríos

When asked to read through a long list of terms and conditions before giving consent, most of us have developed a reflexive response of scrolling to the bottom and trudging ahead. There’s a miniature risk/benefit analysis that we all conduct, which includes a completely unknown potential risk in the distant future, and the near future benefit of moving on. Time is such a valuable commodity that we regularly find ourselves sharing everything from personal data, browsing data, biometric data, and more. Oftentimes, there’s no contract at all. You may have thought you were showing all of your friends how your looks changed from 2009 to 2019, but you were really training someone’s private surveillance software. The list of myopic, nefarious applications that we serve by giving ourselves away to faceless data farms in exchange for what often amounts to a forgettable laugh is endless. In Lauren Lee McCarthy’s Bodily Autonomy exhibition at UC San Diego’s Mandeville Art Gallery, she explores two very specific aspects of the way that we engage with science and technology. With “Surrogate,” she created an application where couples and individuals who are interested in hiring her as a surrogate mother are invited to dictate everything from her eating and sleeping habits, to her daily activities, and more. While these requests are not actually fulfilled, the application itself challenges notions of reproduction, genetic selection, and commerce. With “Saliva” she has created a saliva exchange station that is activated every Thursday from 6-8pm where visitors are invited to give and receive samples of their own saliva. Each participant is given agency to label their sample as they prefer and they provide the conditions for what happens to it (scout’s honor). Doreen A. Ríos, a PhD candidate in Art History, Theory, and Criticism at UC San Diego and an independent curator and researcher, spoke with McCarthy to discuss the implications of these technologies and the imperative within the work to embody a more transparent form of participation.

DOREEN A. RÍOS: There's a conversation within your practice about the ways that we’re not able to shape the systems for which we consent to take part, or these systems are obscure enough that we do not really know what our role is. How do you feel these two bodies of work are connected within the show and your own extended practice?

LAUREN LEE McCARTHY: I started by working on the “Surrogate” project, and for me, there were a lot of questions about control—over a birthing person's body and a life before it begins. The idea of having an app that someone could use to control me as I was their surrogate was this metaphor for the ways that we try to intervene in the process of birth, as well as the desire to have that kind of control. 

As I saw these different ways that we could intervene technologically, there were questions for me about the implications of these interventions. Already, we can select features from a sperm donor, like the eye color, or the height or the race; we can screen the embryo in the uterus and decide that we want to terminate the pregnancy if it carries characteristics that aren’t suitable. The question of what is suitable or acceptable was really present for me. It's also about desires for motherhood, surrogacy and labor in that sense, and kin and family. I was speaking specifically about genetic selection, but the questions of who is a suitable person weren’t as central because there were so many different things happening. The “Saliva” project was a way to highlight some of those questions, and to try and do it in a way that was more accessible and interactive. 

DOREEN A. RÍOS: This question about what's the perfect specimen really comes back to haunt us in a lot of ways—through eugenics, obviously—but in other notions of understanding what a perfect body is. Both of these projects are very much connected to the fact that they have to be embodied. The conversation that we have regularly in terms of data is the extraction of data from a body, and then this data becoming something else, whereas here it’s almost as if it was the opposite exchange. The provocation works in an embodiment rather than a disembodiment. 

LAUREN LEE McCARTHY: A lot of my work is about trying to embody some of the things that are happening around us. It can often feel very-large scale and opaque, like when we hear about AI, or about other technologies that are shaping our lives, like surveillance. We can hear about it as a concept, and it could feel scary or impressive, but it’s very hard to have a visceral understanding of it.

At the same time, I feel like we should be able to form an opinion about these technologies because they directly impact us in so many different ways. A lot of my work is trying to create situations where we can feel that human impact. I'm trying to create a metaphor for us to be able to engage at a scale that feels more personal. It's really about agency on the part of the viewer to say your opinion is important. 

DOREEN A. RÍOS: There's two very powerful moments of the exhibition when it becomes obvious that agency and governance mean very different things to many different bodies. One is the video piece where you’re doing this psych evaluation with the therapist who is trying to see if you're suitable for becoming a surrogate. There's these very specific competing moments where you ask the question “Well, can I make a decision for my own body? The answer is, “No.” And then, right next to it in the Saliva Retreat video you have an active way of trying to engage with the complexities of that, not through your own body, but through the connections that you can create in this specific setting with multiple bodies at the same time.

LAUREN LEE McCARTHY: One thing that was really important was taking the psych evaluation as a starting point, and taking what I learned going through these different reproductive processes. There's a lot of judgments based on your identity—your gender, race, and class—that are projected onto you as you go through the birth industrial complex. Many decisions that should be yours to make about your own body are taken out of your hands. With the saliva thing, there is a provocation. People are challenged to decide if they want to let go of this biological matter or not, and to whom? The whole experience is designed to walk people through the process of donating their saliva and then selecting someone else's in a way where consent and agency are central. That's in contrast to a lot of the technology that we interact with where there’s a long scroll of terms and you just hit ‘okay,’ and don't really have any idea what's happening.

We worked a lot on the language and the design. When people tag their saliva, they decide how they want to identify themselves, as opposed to other medical processes where it's very invasive—they're asking specific questions, or sometimes they're even giving you specific labels that you might not even agree with. Those shifts were very intentional and I hoped to set these things next to each other—the psych evaluation and the Saliva Retreat—so that you could feel the differences of where you, the viewer or the participant, stood in terms of your own agency.

DOREEN A. RÍOS: Having had the experience to participate in the saliva bar, for me, it also turned into a sense of responsibility when you agree to the whole process. You become responsible for someone else's saliva, and I think the roles shift in a very interesting way where now you're the one who has to fulfill someone else's wishes and limits, and you can actually consciously decide to not follow through with that.

That is also another side of this agency—and governance and privacy and surveillance and consent—that we rarely ever see. I remember coming back home with my saliva bag and the first thing I thought was, Where should I place this? I can’t just go and throw it away and say, “Cool experience, bye!” On the other hand, there are other wishes that I need to fulfill.

LAUREN LEE McCARTHY: I love how you put that. We give our personal data constantly throughout the day and it's very hard to conceptualize what that means. I think of the saliva as a physical representation of that. What will I do? Do I throw it away? Do I put it in my refrigerator? It’s a provocation to deal with it instead of something that's seamlessly moved by a system you're barely aware of. It's about creating some of that friction. 

I really like making things that extend beyond the gallery, or extend beyond the frame of what is an art piece or an art experience. It's funny to have these things that end up in your home or go out into the world and then shift or affect your life outside of that in some way, even if it's very small.

DOREEN A. RÍOS: Conversely, it also makes you consider this layer of systems and networks that we cannot opt out of, because it was never a decision for us to be part of them in the first place. You can't help but think, What is it that you're being part of without the possibility of opting out? 

LAUREN LEE McCARTHY: Yes, there's this theme that we've been addressing with these systems that you either have to opt into without a clear understanding, or you're just in them and you never really opted in. There's another layer that is thinking about human relationships and how we understand the boundaries between ourselves and other people. A large theme in that psych evaluation session was this idea that to be pregnant is so risky; to do that for your own family makes total sense, but to do that for someone that is not your genetic relative is crazy. It doesn't make sense. That was something that I heard a lot from family and friends. It comes back to these questions of family and kin and relatedness. For a lot of people, a genetic nuclear family doesn't function as a support structure, and in queer communities we’ve seen a lot of different types of families being formed. One aim of the work was to raise some of those questions; to complicate that a bit.

It was also a performance happening in my life, as I'm trying to make this thing happen that affects my family and my friends. So, I’m having these conversations that are creating friction, they’re rubbing against their ideas of where my body should end, and where someone else's family or life should begin. That's always been a really interesting question for me: where that line is and also making work that is very participatory. Where are the boundaries? I don't want to be crossing lines that shouldn't be crossed without consent, so I’m trying to understand that.

DOREEN A. RÍOS: How do you think about that notion of systems and boundaries with respect to the aesthetic decisions that you make? 

LAUREN LEE McCARTHY: With both the “Surrogate” piece, but especially in the “Saliva” piece, there's a desire to strike this tone that feels like there's clearly a system here, but trying to make it feel somewhat transparent. There's the use of pipes and things that you can see through, like clear curtains, and the bar itself. Similarly, with the Surrogate app, I was trying to make something that feels not super techy, but more like something that we can understand on a human scale.

There's also this desire to capture a feeling that was on one hand, very human and physical, very embodied and visceral. And then, on the other hand, kind of technical. Especially because a lot of that process happened over 2020 and 2021. So, we were doing so much of it over Zoom. It was this very weird dissonance of talking about something that's so physical and embodied, but doing it through screens and apps and forms and emails. I wanted to bring some of that in, but still have the feeling that it was something human that you could touch and hold.

DOREEN A. RÍOS: I definitely think that shows. A couple of years ago, I was collaborating with a group of scientists from the genomic lab at UNAM in Mexico City. They were collaborating with a group of artists to study the ancestry of contemporary Mexicans. There were around 100 participating artists, and they all agreed upon specific contract terms and conditions, because they were donating their DNA samples. The director of the lab was very concerned about the ways in which a lot of these companies like 23andMe started to gain attention. They not only get to create these databases from the people that use their service, but they also charge for it. So, it's the whole opposite thing, right? There is a very interesting connection in terms of why anyone should trust an artist, a scientist, or a random company that is providing a “service” for you to keep your DNA in their lab? That doesn't really cross our minds.

LAUREN LEE McCARTHY: Yeah, totally. Who do we trust, and why? What do you do when you don't necessarily have enough information to make a judgment? I think about those stories of people that donated sperm twenty years ago, thinking this will be anonymous, and then everyone was getting 23andMe, and then they would find cohorts of sperm donor siblings. At the time they thought, Yes, this can remain anonymous. But then, the technology changes and suddenly, you're holding this material, which can have a whole different life. It can transform a relationship or set of relationships. Another part of it was this question about speculation. You're holding someone's saliva or you're giving yours. Right now, you can't do a whole lot with someone’s saliva, but who knows what might be possible in the future? There's also speculation in a value sense: whose saliva might be valuable to be holding, and that was more tongue in cheek. But I’m thinking about this project in a moment of experimentation with other monetary systems, this speculation of which technology or what might you hold that could be valuable in the future?

We should be able to consent and understand the terms of what we're agreeing to, but it's not always possible because of the way time works. And so, how much do you want to spend? How much do we focus on what may or may not happen in the future versus being present right now, or to say it the other way—how much do we just indulge in what's happening right now versus being conscious of what could be coming in the future, and how do we prepare for that?

DOREEN A. RÍOS: It’s really powerful and compelling—the kind of conversation and artistic practice that I believe is very necessary for this moment in time, especially as the systems become more and more obscure, and it seems like we have fewer ways of opting out. 

LAUREN LEE McCARTHY: There's an absurd humor too. When I tell people that there's a saliva exchange happening, people are perplexed. I enjoy engaging with things in that way. These are really difficult conversations and questions, but I’m trying to find a way to also make it playful or silly. 

Bodily Autonomy is on view through May 25 @ UC San Diego’s Mandeville Art Gallery 9655 Scholars Drive North, La Jolla