Full transparency: our “Good Morning“ is dead. I think an effective system leaves traces of itself behind even after it’s gone. If you’ve encountered one, you will have an answer to the question: what did it set in motion? Created on the occasion of Vellum LA x EPOCH’s exhibition Lifelike in 2023, Lauren McCarthy’s “Good Morning” invites the collector into a relationship of sorts. Every relationship has requirements that must be met in order for it to stay alive. In this case, a simple daily “hello” does the trick, which is done by opening the browser window (which is, in a way, acknowledging the artwork’s existence). If you don’t open it for more than 24 hours, it dies. For the short time my “Good Morning” was alive, it was simply another daily task. But when it died, I was surprisingly sad. I wasn’t mourning the pink “Good Morning” graphic, but the fact that I wasn’t grounded in a routine enough to manage simply opening a browser window once a day — it was like garden-neglect with Miracle Grow. With Lauren’s deeply reflective, conceptual, personal, and sophisticated practice, she often asks the public to confront themselves and their relationships with others, sometimes mediated or impacted by technology. With this work, how the very meanings of words like “responsibility” and “ownership” are changing through blockchain are also being unveiled. The death of my “Good Morning” oddly became an event I return to randomly, which always reminds me to look around and ask myself: what else in my life (health, marriage, relationships with family and friends, plants) is being neglected? Is it possible I’ll wake up one day to find that suddenly they’ve vanished as well? It’s possible. This seemingly simple artwork created a dynamic between me, an image, and the artist that demonstrates the power of a system to linger beyond one’s encounter with it and touch on the most intimate, personal aspects of our lives. — Ania Catherine, Operator