Mary Flanagan works as an artist, scientist, and humanist. Her groundbreaking explorations in these arenas represent an innovative use of methods, tools, and technologies to bind research with cultural production. Known for her theories on playculture, activist design, and critical play, Flanagan has achieved international acclaim for her novel interdisciplinary work, her commitment to a theory/practice dialogue, and contributions to social justice design arenas. Her research examines the boundaries between the personal and the public, perception, power, and what technology can teach people about themselves. Using the formal language of the computer program or game to create systems which interrogate seemingly mundane experiences such as writing email, using search engines, playing video games, or saving data to the hard drive, Flanagan reworks these activities to blur the line between the social uses of technology, and what these activities tell us about the technology user themselves. Her artwork ranges from game based systems to computer viruses, embodied interfaces to interactive texts; these works are exhibited internationally at venues including the Laboral Art Center, Whitney, SIGGRAPH, Beall Center, The Banff Centre, The Moving Image Center, Steirischer Herbst, Ars Electronica, Artist’s Space, Guggenheim, Incheon Digital Arts Festival, and and venues in Brazil, France, UK, Canada, Taiwan, New Zealand, and Australia.

As a researcher, she focuses on popular culture, digital studies, and computer games to look at issues of representation, behavior, equity, and process. In the field of creative writing, Flanagan is known as a writer of electronic literature, and she is also a poet, with work in The Iowa Review, Barrow Street, Saranac Review, and other books & periodicals. She has written more than 20 critical essays on digital art, cyberculture, and gaming in periodicals such as Art Journal, Wide Angle, Intelligent Agent, Convergence, and Culture Machine, as well as several books. Her books in English include reload: rethinking women + cyberculture (2002), re:SKIN (2007), and the most recent, Critical Play (2009), all with MIT Press. She writes about popular culture and digital media such as computer games, virtual agents, and online spaces in order to understand how they affect and reflect culture. She is also co-author with Matteo Bittanti of Similitudini. Simboli. Simulacri ( SIMilarities, Symbols, Simulacra ) on The Sims game (in Italian, Unicopli 2003).

In her design practice, Flanagan is the creator of “The Adventures of Josie True,” the first web-based adventure game for girls, and researches and creates socially conscious games, urban games, and software in the theory/practice laboratory she founded in 2003, Tiltfactor, focused on the design of activist and socially-conscious software.
Mary Flanagan holds MFA and MA degrees from the University of Iowa, a BA in Film from the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, and a Ph.D. in Computational Media focusing on game design from Central Saint Martins College of Art and Design, University of the Arts London. Flanagan’s work has been supported by commissions, the NEH, the ACLS, and she has been PI or co-PI on six National Science Foundation research grants. She is the Sherman Fairchild Distinguished Professor in Digital Humanities at Dartmouth College. .
http://www.maryflanagan.com; http://www.tiltfactor.org; http://www.valuesatplay.org

Flanagan is the founder of techARTS, a not-for-profit program in Buffalo to encourage girls’ use of technology by exploring the arts with computers.

Flanagan on wikipedia here.

Blog: the lovely GrandTextAuto.org

See more at Mission to Learn+ Games4Change

My creative practice investigates human relationships with systems — technological, representational, linguistic, and experiential — from my position in a technologically-infused society. In my work I explore the relationship between such systems and their intersections with everyday life. Therefore, games, computer viruses, search engines, cell phones, email — seemingly boring or ordinary computationally-driven systems — become for me extraordinary and revealing artifacts representing themes of human desire, intimacy, secrecy, language, and the conceptual spaces of machines themselves.

I use technologies such as computer game engines and networked databases as materials by which to explore the cultural impact of digital technology as it permeates everyday life, while it in turn is continually reshaped. The process of creating the work feeds from ‘internet culture’ and ‘computational customs’, investigating how flippant trends become ongoing conceptual and physical ‘truths.’ Making these works is a way of creating alternate systems which reach a peace with the both the impermanence of the medium and its forms: the simultaneous fleeting nature of bits and bytes and conversely, the way these forms forge more lasting conceptual systems. The work manifests in a variety of forms: web-based media, computer applications, games, software, and social convention — forms governed by rule sets which render possible worlds, yet each system involves serendipity and accident as aleatoric, experiential interventions. These eruptions of chance operations work entirely within the way systems offer flexibility in their construction of rules. within the very code that paradoxically is to create can be programmed to create situations of extreme variability. To me, works based on algorithms need such accidents to ‘humanize’ the planned, calculated precision of the program in the development process, even if this results in a very precise final outcome. Each of the works represents a blend of research, process, procedure, and performance/execution. In this way these conceptually driven works form a hybrid of research, process, and performance.