A Full Room at LACMA

There is limited capacity for this event. We ask that you contact the organizer if you are unable to attend so we may offer your ticket to someone else. Thank you!

The Coded exhibition explores the impact of computer technology on art making and the public consciousness over the period 1952–1982. Reflecting with a view from 2023, we see how our public and internal spaces have been restructured. How do we represent and share our experience? What is rendered inaccessible? What are the ways to fill an empty room?

A Full Room is an after hours happening in An Empty Room, an installation by Casey REAS at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, commissioned for the Coded: Art Enters the Computer Age, 1952-1982 exhibition. Featuring performances by Edgar Fabián Frías, Lauren Lee McCarthy, Romi Ron Morrison, and Casey REAS, we’re asking “What is social software?”

This event will be interactive. Please let us know if you need any accessibility accommodations.

Casey Reas' software, prints, and installations have been featured in numerous solo and group exhibitions at museums and galleries in the United States, Europe, and Asia. His work ranges from small works on paper to urban-scale installations, and he balances solo work in the studio with collaborations with architects and musicians. Reas' work is in a range of private and public collections, including the Centre Georges Pompidou and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. Reas is a professor at the University of California, Los Angeles. He holds a master's degree from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Media Arts and Sciences and a bachelor's degree from the College of Design, Architecture, Art, and Planning at the University of Cincinnati. With Ben Fry, Reas initiated Processing in 2001; Processing is an open-source programming language and environment for the visual arts.

Lauren Lee McCarthy is an artist examining social relationships in the context of surveillance, automation, and network culture through performance, software, and installation. Her works consist of performances inviting viewers to engage. To remote control her dates. To be followed. To welcome her in as their human smart home. To attend a party hosted by artificial intelligence. In these interactions, there is a reciprocal risk taking and vulnerability, as performer and audience are both challenged to relinquish control, both implicated, as each reformulate their own relationship to the systems that govern our lives. Lauren has received numerous grants, fellowships, and residencies from Creative Capital, United States Artists, Sundance, Eyebeam, LACMA, Mass MoCA, Pioneer Works, Stanford, NYU, and Ars Electronica. Lauren's work has been widely exhibited internationally. Lauren is also the creator of p5.js, an open-source art and education platform that prioritizes access and diversity in learning to code with over 10 million users worldwide. Lauren expanded on this work on the board at the Processing Foundation, whose mission is to serve those who have historically not had access to the fields of technology, code, and art.

Edgar Fabián Frías is a multidisciplinary artist, psychotherapist, educator, curator, and brujx based in Los Angeles. With a passion for breaking boundaries and creating new forms of knowledge, Frías blends diverse artistic disciplines to produce thought-provoking and immersive works of art that transcend conventional categories. Their oeuvre encompasses installation, photography, video art, sound, sculpture, printed textiles, GIFs, performance, social practice, and community organizing, reflecting their commitment to experimentation and innovation. Frías' work explores themes of resistance, resiliency, and radical imagination in the face of colonization, environmental racism, and other contemporary issues. Drawing on Indigenous Futurism, spirituality, play, pedagogy, animism, witchcraft, and queer aesthetics, Frías offers a unique perspective on the complexities of modern society. Through their art, they bridge the gap between the traditional and the contemporary and create spaces for contemplation and transformation. As a nonbinary, Wixárika, and Latinx artist whose family hails from Mexico, Frías brings a rich and diverse background to their practices. They hold dual BA degrees in Psychology and Studio Art from UC, Riverside, and an MA in Clinical Mental Health Counseling with a focus on Interpersonal Neurobiology and Somatic Psychotherapy from Portland State University. In 2022, they completed an MFA in Art Practice at UC Berkeley. Frías' work has been exhibited internationally, including at prestigious venues such as the Vincent Price Art Museum, Institute of Contemporary Art San Francisco, Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive, Oregon Contemporary, MOCA Jacksonville, Project Space Festival Juárez, and ArtBo. Their art, tarot, and multidisciplinary practices have also been featured in numerous publications, including Cosmopolitan, Taschen, ELLE UK, Bustle, Nylon, Los Angeles Times, Slate, CVLT Nation, Terremoto, and Hyperallergic, among others.

Romi Ron Morrison is an interdisciplinary artist, researcher, and educator. Their work investigates the personal, political, ideological, and spatial boundaries of race, ethics, and social infrastructure within digital technologies. Using maps, data, sound, performance, and video, their installations center Black diasporic technologies that challenge the demands of an increasingly quantified world—reducing land into property, people into digits, and knowledge into data. Romi has exhibited work and given talks at numerous exhibitions, conferences, and workshops around the world including Transmediale (Berlin), ALT_CPH Biennial (Copenhagen), the American Institute of Architects (New York), Museum of Contemporary Art (Chicago), Haus der Kulturen der Welt (Berlin), Queens Museum (New York), and the Walker Museum of Art. They have been in residence at Eyebeam Center for Art + Technology, New York University (ITP), The Joan Mitchell Foundation, and FemTechNet. Their writing has appeared in publications by MIT Press, University of California Press, Catalyst: Feminism, Theory, Technoscience, and Logic Magazine. They have taught courses at Parsons School of Design and the University of Southern California (USC). They are currently an Annenberg PhD Fellow in the School of Cinematic Arts at USC in Los Angeles.