American writer Henry David Thoreau extolled going forth in the world to experience its bounty and characteristics through the simple act of walking. Thoreau avoided highways, choosing instead to wander with indirectness in order to understand the spiritual possibilities of the landscape: “Two or three hours’ walking will carry me to as strange a country as I expect…”

[borders] is video documentation of a series of such walks, conducted virtually in popular, shared online multi-user worlds. The rendered landscape is beautiful and hypnotic and we are transported directly into Thoreau’s walking shoes, “glimps(ing) Elysium, but only as he walked along, surveying the boundaries and divisions…” 

In [borders] aquitaine, walking exposes inherent traits and glitches of the virtual by testing its edges. Walking through real wilderness leads one to see beyond the boundary(s) both mental and physical. In virtual worlds owned by thousands of players, there appear to be seamless landscapes as far as the eye can see, appearing to some extent as the “commons” of old. One can find, however, and walk along invisible boundaries of ownership, breaking up the illusion of a cohesive landscape. In following the invisible virtual property lines separating one player’s property from another, the walker may become stuck in stones, forced underwater or pushed teetering at the edge of the world –exposing the algorithmic nature of landscape rendering and the cut-off points between subscribers or those who have virtual ownership. Thus, this border-walk dwells on the limitations of virtual property ownership and the way in which behavior and point of view are affected when intersecting with these invisible disruptions in the seamless world, exposing its constructed nature. 
Included in the series:
[borders: aquitaine]
[borders: chichen itza]
[borders: giza]
[borders: pantheon]
[borders: la rocha]

[ghost city] uses a game-like interface where the participant maneuvers around an aerial map of the district around Bellevue Hospital in New York City. As the participant moves around the map, roving snippets of text, selections from poems written in the neighborhood around Bellevue, slip down streets or pop up at unexpected locations. The participant can creates dynamic collisions from the individual poems, making an entirely new and separate work that continually shifts and changes.

Bellevue, the oldest public hospital in the US, is open to patients of all backgrounds, irrespective of ability to pay, More than 80 percent of Bellevue’s patients come from the city’s medically underserved populations. Long known for its extensive psychiatric facility which are frequently referenced in fiction, movies and television, Bellevue has become synonomous for such facilities.

There is an ancient desire to expand poetry’s expressive potential by integrating visual elements and break free from a purely linear text. Shaped poems in Greek, Latin, Arabic, Hebrew, Chinese and Sanskrit suggest a common human urge to more closely model written language into a form related to its meaning. Even early 20th century modernists like artist/poet Apollinaire manipulated text to fashion a literary syntheses of space. If Apollinaire and his predecessors endeavored to mould pictorial strategies onto the demands of poetry, then Flanagan’s contemporary project [xyz] intends an analogous mapping—that of applying the rituals and structures of computer games onto – and into— a poetic system.

In [xyz] three independent player-readers reconstruct a three-part poem written by the artist. Player-readers interact by following the visual logic used by players of platform computer games. The rules of game play and the rules of language reside in the same location. Rather than collecting treasure or avoiding enemies, the player-reader instead collects, avoids and reshapes the text. Intermixing behaviors from both a writer’s editing process and the rituals of conventional game interaction, the text is continually in flux. Player-readers create dynamic combinations of new texts using the fundamental spacial system governing all computerized spaces, the Cartesian coordinate system of three independent axis lines: x, y and z.  Participants interact with the words on the screen using a common game controller to collect sets of words. These sets are then sent to a larger projected image where the three player-readers’ choices are combined.

This 21st century variation functions as a concrete poem, a game, and as an exploration of spatial deixis, where the context surrounding a word or phrase is critical to understanding its meaning. Deixis is a phenomenon common to both literature and games and in [xyz] the player/reader’s experience of the ‘line’ as both text and space becomes a key point of reference, a center of the spatial understanding of each text.

Game programming and network design by Jack Bowman
Additional audio by Michelle Earhart

Songdo is not the first Utopian city—Brasilia is one of many another examples, which at its completion in 1960 promised a utopian experience of a redesigned city specifically for the modern lifestyle. Inevitably, utopian visions are met with the mundane realities of living inside these ‘golden dreams’. Today, Brasiliense families manifest their rejections of utopian design by reasserting familiar values, concepts and conventions of urban life. Songdo may function in a similar pattern.

PERFECT.CITY is a 2-channel video installation consisting of a large double-sided projection screen.

One side of the screen alternates between live-action footage of the artist recreating the design process of the city, scrubbing backwards and forwards through time, mixed with a time-lapse recording of the planning and construction of the virtual city. This video component mimics a documentary style look at “the making of” New Songdo.

On the opposite screen is a slow motion animation, using the popular SIM City software, of a population wandering aimlessly amongst cold, bland and featureless urban street-scapes. This future city is unattached to history and the somnambulist pedestrians point to the weary, stale, and unprofitable experience of techno-utopianism.The featureless city streets depicted call into question the all too brief period and limited input from non-corporate entities devoted to planning the city.

In PERFECT.CITY I explore the use of technology in everyday settings and how it both reflects and creates phenomenological experiences. These experiences are interdependent, symbiotic and create meaning in a mutual fashion. In depicting the role of ‘planner and developer’ in PERFECT.CITY, I embody and perform the process of creating utopic visions, where dreams pass into action and back again. Though these cycles are complex, the work minimizes the aesthetics to feature the beauty of the mundane: both on the programming side, and within the everyday life that a future utopia would present.

[domestic] uses a software engine normally used to generate violent first-shooter video games in order to reconstruct a remembered childhood space where a dramatic event has taken place: a house fire.

The participant navigates an oddly constructed domestic space. Spaces alternate between claustrophobic hallways and rooms with seemingly endless ceilings, breaking with the visual conventions of 3D gaming in its more predictable interpretation of physical space. In [domestic], participants encounter an ambiguous rendering of scale. Family snapshots and shifting, morphing unstable texts line the surfaces of the space. The snapshots, soft-focus images of typical domestic scenes, are projected overwhelmingly large, bringing the perceived scale of doorways and rooms into question. The perfectly crisp and squared walls typical of computer game geometries further abstract the sense of space.

Players encounter fire in the space and are able to shoot “coping mechanisms” at the walls and at the growing fire in order to contain these as they threaten to consume the world and the player. These mechanisms are manifested as book covers from romance novels, popular as an escape from the mundane aspects of domestic life.

[domestic] functions as both a virtual, interactive installation and a flexible means of storytelling, where the navigator is free to explore and linger. There is a subtle anxiety between traditional 3D game conventions and discovery in the highly stylized nature of the [domestic] experience.The ‘house’ depicted is less a physical space as a psychic one, a container for memory, with texts lining and extruding from walls. Recalling simple childhood memories (“it was springtime. A little muddy”), the world offers conflicting impressions and suggests a gap in memory (for example, a staircase built from the word ‘reconstructed’).

The work provokes the questions, what are the ways space and memory are cognitively tied and can such ties be re-experienced? What role, if any, does narrative and memory have in contemporary computer games? How can we ‘see’ memory?

[domestic] premiered at the Playthings Exhibition in Sydney Australia in October 2003, organized by DLux media|arts.

Read about [domestic] in the 2006 book New Media Art

Additional credits:
Andrew Gerngross, weapons designer

A physical computing based installation, corporate ladder is a changing commentary about alienation in corporate workforces. As participants move closer and close to examine the canned images of women using technology or performing business tasks or positions, the images blur, problematizing the notion of legibility in these roles.

How would one as an artist examine women’s roles in the workforce, and in particular, the relatively overlooked phenomenon of women in corporate jobs? How is it possible to examine or recreate phenomenon that women experience daily? Take for example the still problematic social phenomenon of the glass ceiling.

The numbers of women corporate officers in US was 10.6% of the workforce in 1997 (Business Week 44). For many women managers in these settings, there seems to be an invisible — and impenetrable — barrier between women and the executive suite, leaving them at the peak of their careers at a significantly lower levels than those of their male counterparts. While management may seem like a golden spot for women struggling for their career dreams, the experience of being a woman in management is under-explored in critical and creative spheres. It is a seldom-discussed experience in which the subtleties of authority, self-esteem, control, and glass ceilings manifest in their most deviant and deceptive ways.

Far from a rewarding career, a management position can be the site of a very fierce struggle for identity. The federal Glass Ceiling Commissions’ bipartisan study in 1995 found that although some positive steps are being taken, the glass ceiling essentially was intact. Minority men and women of all races are not well-represented in the upper ranks of the companies reviewed compared with their overall numbers in the workforce. (Castro and Furchtgott-Roth, 1997). While it seems that the feminist movement has achieved a victory by opening doors to women in upper level positions, a deeper examination reveals that this goal has not yet been fully achieved.

Corporate Ladder is a computer-driven installation which explores women and work through images of women in corporate settings. The user moves through a physical space toward either a projection or a monitor displaying images of women working in corporate environments. As the participant approaches the image, the image incrementally becomes blurred, and by the time the user is close to the piece, the image is eradicated, switching out to another series of work images. Thus, visitor/participants directly influence the images they see or cannot see by their proximity to the images of the women.
When they are close to the image, the images becomes untraceable and indefinable; the user is positioned in a kind of visual glass ceiling.

The project focuses on images of popular representations of women’s bodies– the interface for work– in their offices and cubicles, engaged with the technology around them. The goal of this piece is it is to put the user inside the tension women have maintaining multiple and opposed identities as corporate worker, the image of the corporate worker, and self.

Corporate Ladder is part of a trajectory of my technological exploration of women’s experiences. The goal of my artistic practice is to develop interactive environments which feature material and explore issues largely ignored by “technoculture.” These have included women’s stories, narratives of aging, and critical investigations of the computer as a medium itself. Corporate Ladder, an interactive installation, allows me to approach the content with novel strategies in interface to examine women’s work. – - – - – - – - -

- – - – - – - – - – Castro, Ida L. and Furchtgott-Roth, Diana. “Q: Should women be worries about the glass ceiling in the workplace?” Insight on the News. Feb 10, 1997 v13 n5 p24(4). Business Week. “Perforations in the glass ceiling.” Dec 22, 1997 n3558 p44(1).


[six.circles] is a 2 player conceptual game exploring cooperation and competition through the construction of simple geometic objects.

The goal is to be the first to construct a series of 6 circle forms while fending off viruses seeking to infect each piece. Players are obliged to periodically attach infected pieces to their chain of forms and have to negotiate and sacrifice to cooperatively prevent the spread of the disease, all while attempting to win the game. While one player generally wins, the structure of the game explores themes of cooperation, interdependence and conflicting goals in play.

If the player finds the case that all of the pieces of a given chain are infected, the infection changes with each turn to a full blown diseased piece which can no longer be assimilated into a circle. If an entire chain is diseased, it spawns new disease pieces with each turn. 

The game is inspired by the Six Circles mathematical theorem which states: within any triangle, any chain of circles that touch both their circular neighbors as well as two of the sides of the triangle is limited to a maximum of six circles. This dry geometric law subtly suggests a mathematical proof supporting the need for balance in any given community. Any large circle leaves less room for the remaining circles, suggesting sustainability. This theorem provides an approach towards collaboration within a community.  

Originally commissioned by the Wooloo (link to the site) organization for the show ‘Thank You’, an HIV awareness project raising funds for the creation of an HIV Education Center in the township of Khayelitsha, South Africa via online interactions with the art work.

[six.circles] premiered at Artists’ Space, SOHO NYC in December 2004.

Special thanks to Ruth Catlow & Joline Blais for their indispensable input
Technical Engineering + Additional Design: Christopher Egert
Game server hosting generously provided by the
Rochester Institute of Technology’s
Collaborative Multimedia Experience group
Information Technology Department

Many thanks to Jon Ippolito, Joline
Blais, and the University of Maine’s
Code & Creativity v3.0 :
“Games: Making and Unmaking the World”

She Went Back is an experimental personal documentary about Flanagan’s father’s childhood in the South Bronx, and the way in which family histories, such as her grandmother’s death in the Bronx, are communicated and remembered. The work was shown at the POV festival in New York.

When it was proclaimed that the Library contained all books, the first impression was one of extravagant happiness. All men felt themselves to be the masters of an intact and secret treasure… At that time it was also hoped that a clarification of humanity’s basic mysteries […] might be found. …
There are official searchers, inquisitors.
I have seen them in the performance of their function: they always arrive extremely tired from their journeys; they speak of a broken stairway which almost killed them; they talk with the librarian of galleries and stairs; sometimes they pick up the nearest volume and leaf through it, looking for infamous words.

–Jorge Luis Borges, “The Library of Babel” (1)

Information technology has become an indespensible element in communication, play, and work. For example, a recent study shows that a typical office worker relies more on e-mail communication than face-to-face contact to share knowledge.(2) Almost every computer user relies upon Internet search engines to gather information, seek entertainment, and find pleasure. Search engines are deeply embedded into daily activity-they are the primary way people in the 21st century seek information …”we depend upon them so utterly.” (3)

Searching the internet, however, is regularly confusing and chaotic. Like Borges’ inquisitors mentioned in the passage above, searchers are regularly besieged with lists of thousands of results, and no systematic keyword system has yet developed to standardize the language of the search.(4) Searching can be frustrating, and the material discovered is often inaccurate. Searchers themselves offer to the mix complicated requests, misspellings, and odd X-rated content descriptions; the kinds of things people search for might seem disturbing, petty, or peculiar.

Search engines map, through phrase-like inquiries, our desire to find knowledge. Monitoring such desires allows us to read and live through other people’s interests.(5) To further explore this very critical aspect of Internet life, I developed [search]. [search] is an internet-based application which explores the human desire for information and knowledge through real-time monitoring of internet search engine inquiries from around the world. This research ties in specifically with my internet-based artistic practice, pushing the performative, live, and user-influenced aspects of pieces such as [remotion] (2002), [collection] (2001) and [rootings] (2001).

The work conceptually explores everyday life: how do people use technology in their daily lives? What are the commonalities of human desire? How is the desire affected by the internet’s inherent immediacy? What kinds of language do people bring to search engines? Does the kind of language used by searchers tell us something about how people view the internet and technology? Do people search for material or experiential items? How much time do people spend searching for sex, drugs, or money? Do people spend an equal amount of time searching for friends, god, and spirituality? Are our human values exposed through search engines? What is the data most sought after?

[search] is programmed using the Lingo programming language. Users click on words in the live search feed as they find words in others’ searches which interest them. These words separate, and conduct their own searches on themselves. Users can drag two words together which interest them to produce associative searches.

At this point, who is the searcher? What is being searched?

Acknowledgements:

-This project was funded by a commission from the University of Colorado @ Boulder.
-Special thanks to Brian Brantner, software engineer on the project. He can be found at http://www.marcotte.com.
-AskJeeves.com is used for the search engine feed
-EAT: Edinburgh Associative Thesaurus, a psycholinguistic database, is used to search joint searches from dragged “wordcloud” items

____________

1 Borges, Jorge Luis. “The Library of Babel.” Labyrinths. New York: New Directions, 1964, 55.

2 “Survey Shows Office Workers Rely More Heavily On E-mail Than Face-to-Face Contact to Share Knowledge; AIIM Attendees Surveyed on Work Practices.” Business Wire March 7, 2002, 2393.

3 Toto, Christian. “Web Wise.” Insight on the News, Dec 10, 2001.17:46, 32-34.

4 Guernsey, Lisa. “The Search Engine as Cyborg.” The New York Times. Technology Sect. Jn 29 2000.

5 Garrity, Bronwyn. “Some Cyberspace of Her Own: Escapes From the Dark Horrible Sucking Trail of the Lost Voice.” The Nation, March 19, 2001. 272:11, 25.

[rootwords] is a language experimentation environment. Beginning with a simple poem by the maker, the program’s goal is to “grow” a new language from English root words using common prefixes, suffixes, and other components. Users click the root words to grow an organism of variations and linguistic complexity.

The programming reflects probabilities in the way language can and does evolve. In some ways the program begins to reflect other language path metaphors, such as an illustratin of the Indo European language tree.