contact=info.at.maryflanagan.com
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
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.
perfect.city
2009
For those living in present times, the promise of the ‘future city’ is imagined as a special place designed to eliminate social ills, provide care-free living, and induce happiness for all. Yet time and time again, the utopian visions of future thinkers are met with the mundane realities of living inside these ‘golden dreams.’ Ubiquitous computing is here, but it remains a controversial idea that could foster an all-knowing, Big Brother style society. The vision for new cities such as the constructed Songdo City include luxuries aimed at catering to citizen’s needs and whims as well as offering peace of mind. In this case, the world of the possible has much more of a draw than the world of the actual.
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.
[theHouse]
software / text
downloadable application for pc
downloadable for mac
[theHouse] is a digital poetry piece which takes the form of computer based, spatialized organism.world. Through the process of enacting texts within, alongside, and outside of the text of computational code, this autobiographical work is regulated by the computational process of the sin wave. Here, the text is written upon ‘rooms,’ and these rooms emerge to create ‘houses’ next to and among the intermingling text. As in much of electronic literature, the experience of the works as an intimate, interactive, screen based piece is essential to understanding and appreciating the work.
Habitual Cage
2003
the habituation cage was a 24 hour, site specific performative experiment organized and masterminded by Sara Diamond of Code Zebra and enacted at the Dutch Electronic Arts Festival in Rotterdam, March 2003.
I was locked in the paraSITE structure for 24 hours with Tom Donaldson, another inventor.
In our time together, we detailed many possible inventions, approaches, formulae, and artworks for exploring issues surrounding technology and intimacy, time and space in games, and other fabulous topics.
Tthe Dutch Electronic Art Festival is an international and interdisciplinary bi-annual festival organized by V2_Organisation in Rotterdam (Netherlands), the Institute for the Unstable Media. DEAF presents an exhibition of interactive installations, WWW-sites, CD-ROMs and live performances, seminars, workshops and an academic symposium. The event brings together a varied group of visitors, artists and critics from home and abroad and attracts a growing and diversifying audience. DEAF has established itself as one of the major European media art events. It is a showcase for recent, in part specially commissioned artwork, as well as a forum for critical debate. The festival creates synergies between different art disciplines and fields like robotics, architecture, bio-technology or economics.
