[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.

Mary Flanagan’s interest in virtual environments and interactive writing led to her focus her new work [xyz] on the spatial metaphors inherent within virtual systems and on the grammatical and lexical notions in language itself.

In [xyz], the rules of game playing and the rules for language reside in the same location. Player-readers participate in the dynamic combination of new texts using the fundamental metaphoric system that governs the development of computerized spaces—namely, the 16th Century three dimensional Cartesian coordinate system, with axis lines x, y, and z.

The gallery contains a computer-controlled application for each axis. Each of these directions contains a different section of a larger text. Visitors to the gallery may interact with the words on the screen using the controller located under the screen and collect sets of words as they wish. These words are then sent to the projected image where the player-readers’ choices combine.

A work of electronic literature by Mary Flanagan
Game programming and network design by Jack Bowman
Additional audio by Michelle Earhart

Background to the work [xyz]

There is an ancient desire to expand the expressiveness of poetry by combining literary and visual communication. Shaped poems in Greek, Latin, Arabic, Hebrew, Chinese, and Sanskrit all indicate a common human urge to compel language into the form of its meaning. Visual poetry, or concrete poetry, is the term applied in the 1950s, long after early Twentieth Century visual poet Apollinaire manipulated his text to fashion a literary syntheses of space. If Apollinaire and other writers endeavored to mould pictorial strategies onto the demands of poetry, then Flanagan’s contemporary project intends an analogous mapping—that of applying the metaphors and structures of computer games onto – and into— a poetic system.

The artist’s curiosity about the process of writing and rewriting the text led her to examine the ritualistic behaviors constituting conventional game interaction. In [xyz] the player-reader reconstructs the poem by following a visual logic similar to that used by the player of a platform game. Instead of collecting coins or avoiding enemies as in a stereotypical game of this sort, the player-reader collects and avoids text. In the end, the work changes incredibly through reader participation.

[xyz] functions on multiple levels as a concrete poem, a game, and as way to explore the epistemological development of spatial deixis in a game-like system. Often in games, as in interactive literature, player-readers experience the phenomenon wherein understanding the meaning of certain words and phrases is dependent on contextual information. In [xyz] the reader’s experience of the line becomes the point of reference, the center of the spatial understanding of each text and the site for spatial deixis.

Relationships between the line, interaction, behavior, and metaphor are at play as the player-reader traverses the poem space. How does the player choose to construct his or her mental model in this work?

Songdo is not the first utopian city—Brasilia is one example, which at its completion in 1960 promised a utopian urban experience with almost no imperfections. Today, Brasiliense families manifest their rejections of utopian design by reasserting familiar values, conceptions, and conventions of urban life. Songdo, scheduled for completion in 2015, will likely function in a similar pattern.

It is not every day that a corporation has the carte blanche opportunity to design a city from the ground up. The developer is Gale International, and the technological infrastructural designer is Microsoft. Thus, the city is a corporate venture which not only privatizes public space, but private lives. Questions have been asked such as, “So will it be the sort of place where the authorities will know instantly if you don’t recycle your drinks can? “We will build in all this functionality,” answers Catherine Maras, Microsoft’s Director of Worldwide E-Government who is involved in the Songdo project. “Really it’s opt-in or opt-out. Whatever the citizens want to make their lives easier.”

In my work I explore the ways in which everyday experiences of technology reflect, or create, phenomenological experiences. Experiences with technology are interdependent and symbiotic, creating meaning in a mutual fashion. In making a PERFECT.CITY, I embody and perform the utopian visions of both urban space and notions of technological progress that are always bound to historic periods of innovation, 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.

PERFECT.CITY is an installation consisting of a large double-sided video projection of SIMS machinima and live action.

On one side of the large hanging screen, I perform as a representative from Gale International and Microsoft and recreate the design process of the city backwards and forwards through time. As I research and plan, the video takes on a kind of documentary of the making and placing of digital files in the planning of Songdo city in The Sims 3. The video offers a time-lapse massive recording of the planning and construction of the virtual city in fast-forward on one wall. The performance of “speed coding” is also a part of this work as the constructed vantage point is shown in present, past, and future all together.

On the opposite projection field, extreme slow motion close-ups of corners and peasantries and perfectness of the fabled future city transform time relative to our everyday experiences. Each video runs a total of 23 minutes.

The scenes are blank, boring, and unimaginative. The future city is a sonambulist, unattached to no history, unless one looks to the site itself, a 1376-acre piece built on a landfill “about the size of midtown Manhattan.” Commonplace scenes such as people walking by and pointless pedestrians point to the weary, stale, and unprofitable experience of techno-utopianism. The video offers viewers a space within a space, a utopia that contains continuous, everyday interactions that point to the imagined space of a utopian planning endeavor as more real than the actual environment the planning process will create. This spectacle of idealistic delirium comments on the never-ending need for people to fail to see the amazing things around them and celebrate them. “To hear planner John B. Hynes tell it, the rise of New Songdo City will be as dramatic as the resurfacing of Atlantis” (Poire 2004).

The Machinima work calls into question the imagined, constructed nature of this and other simulations and cities, and the short time used in decision making and modeling, which results in perhaps oversimplified rulesets and interactions. The character’s dull interactions become one of many datapoints in the constructed city.

[domestic] explores personal memories and the construction of space within memory in a 3D computer game environment.

As an artist’s computer game modification, [domestic] breaks visual conventions by creating a claustrophobic, conceptual environment in which images take on iconic readings. The picturesque family snapshot, for example, is mingled with the crisp square framework of computer game level geometry, creating a particular sense of scale and abstracted sense of space. A mix of photographic images and unstable texts layer the environment to reframe the act of memory, specifically, of childhood experience intersecting with spatial, temporal, and visual conventions within an interactive environment.

The work approaches interactive storytelling conventions by loosely depicting a childhood memory of a house fire. Created primarily of texts from within and extruding out of the walls, the work’s creation of the virtual house becomes a container for memory, a movements from the memory. Players shoot “coping mechanisms” at the walls and at the growing fire within the space in order to contain it as it threatens to consume the world — and the player.

This personal, ethnographic work on memory poses the question, what are the ways space and memory are cognitively tied, and can such ties be re-experienced? What is the role of narrative and memory in computer games, and how do game environments, particularly the physical architectures constructed in game environments, radiate cultural and social meanings?

Because the game is built in the Unreal Tournament 2003 engine, there is an anxiety produced between traditional 3D action play and the exploratory nature of the [domestic] experience, as well as a tension generated between popular 3D games’ post industrial spaces and the more abstract home space created in [domestic].

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

Read about [domestc] 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).

Players construct groups of shapes which eventually are built up into complete circles, but they do so amidst attacks by virus objects which invade the community. Players must attach illness pieces to some shapes in the game world every so many turns, and illness spreads down the chain, infecting it turn by turn.

When all 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. Players have to negotiate and sacrifice to cooperatively solve the problem, prevent the spread of the disease, while still attempting to win the game by creating six circles—an idea based on the Six Circles mathematical theorem: in a triangle, any chain of circles that touch their neighbors and successive pairs of sides of the triangle counts at most six circles, where the sixth circle is tangent to the first. To the artist, this metaphor of “perfect” shapes working together within an uneven “triangle” closely resembles the way community and individuals affect each other.

While one of the two players generally wins the game, the structure of the game explores the themes of cooperation, interdependence and conflicting goals in play.

This game was a commission by the Wooloo organization for its ‘Thank You’ show, an HIV awareness project which raises 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

[six.circles] by Mary Flanagan 2004
with the indispensible input of Ruth Catlow + Joline Blais.
Technical Engineering + Additional Design by Christopher Egert
Game server hosting by generosity of
Rochester Institute of Technology
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)

visit [search] ; visit [search] and other projects at the Mapping Transitions site

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.

The individual components in the work are loosely based around different life episodes that have to do with time-passing, skipping, rewinding, time travel, and memory.

Elements of quantum mechanics and string theory open the door to scientific inquiry about time in the 21st Century, inquiries which can begin with our daily domestic, personal experiences. We can think about remembering an episode in one’s life within the context of scientific theories of time, for example, as more like a simultaneous event, parallel world, or constant, not simply a memory or a past happening. This project uses scientific background in perception of time and the physics of time in string theory to tease out ideas about time in narrative, mental order/disorder, and interactivity.

In [rootings], we encounter time in unusual ways; each string or episode itself is a recurring or cyclical event which takes the form of an abstract yet interactive “arcade style” game. Here, I am using game systems as materials and methods by which to explore these boundary zones, involving both intellectual hypotheses and the commonplace as locations and manifestations of socio-technological phenomenon-both the conditions of time and memory are extremely difficult to study and are heavily subjective.

The main interface of [rootings] is based on a reverberating circuit diagram. The brain, an organ composed of over 50 billion nerve cells, is connected by axons and dendrite conduits. Any type of activity in the brain (hearing a sound, problem solving, reading) sets off neural circuits throughout the nerve cells. While every experience creates new pathways, some of the circuits created repeat over and over, marking out a fixed location and becoming part of memory. These reverberating circuits start with input which produces a signal, which in turn becomes encoded within a neuroloop, producing a short-term memory function. A reverberating circuit, for example, creates physiological memory.

[rootings] encourages players to begin digging around in these circuits, using the physiological actions of clicking, tracing, and the repetitive process of game play to reinscribe memories from maker to player.

The heart of this research project is based around recent readings in physics, neurology, and most notably, string theory, which support the idea of tangible simultaneities, much like real, visceral memories or deja vous. The work deals directly about time and memory through rich imagery and sound and through the perspective of a woman maker and through the use of stories and relationships in personal, everyday, almost mundane occurances to show that such slips of time are equally everyday happenings.

[rootings], like other web art projects, is not “created” unless users are interacting with it. The work becomes a blend between research, process, and performance. Like Andre Breton and other critic/makers, I celebrate lapses in time, perhaps because in the very act of making creative work one loses oneself to time utterly.