The Changing Room

Can we choose our emotions? Can we control them? And what if our control over these emotions, ours and other people’s, was absolute? American artist Lauren Lee McCarthy creates the interactive audio-visual installation The Changing Room and through it she wonders: “How would you like to feel?” Then offering us the opportunity to experience it.

In The Changing Room, participants are invited to browse and select one of the hundreds of “available” emotions on a screen. Once they choose, a layered environment of light, optics, sound and text comes into operation to evoke this feeling in them and in everyone sharing that space. Operating as a “smart” environment, The Changing Room intrudes on and at the same time cares about the emotions of its viewers, raising concerns about modern surveillance systems, "smart homes" and social technologies.

Lauren Lee McCarthy
Created in collaboration with Sean Druitt, Ryan Bargiel, Allan Bishop, Samuel Collins, Daniel Fisher, Simon Harrison, Brian Jeffery, Andy Bates, Yu Kao. Additional software development by Stalgia Grigg.

This project was completed as part of a TRANSMIT³.

Details of the program are likely to change in accordance with the latest COVID-19 health measures.