En Brief: Mary Flanagan is an innovator focused on how people create and use technology. Her groundbreaking explorations across the arts, humanities, and sciences represent a novel use of methods and tools that bind research with introspective cultural production. As an artist, the collection of over 20 major works range from game-inspired systems to computer viruses, embodied interfaces to interactive texts; these works are exhibited internationally. As a scholar interested in how human values are in play across technologies and systems, Flanagan has written more than 20 critical essays and chapters on games, empathy, gender and digital representation, art and technology, and responsible design. Her three books in English include Critical Play (2009) with MIT Press. Flanagan founded the Tiltfactor game research laboratory in 2003, where researchers study and make social games, urban games, and software in a rigorous theory/practice environment. She is the Sherman Fairchild Distinguished Professor in Digital Humanities at Dartmouth College.

http://www.maryflanagan.com; http://www.tiltfactor.org

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Known for her theories on playculture, activist design, and critical play, Mary Flanagan has achieved international acclaim for her novel interdisciplinary work, her commitment to both theory and practice, and her ongoing pioneering contributions to the field of digital art. 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, The Whitney Museum of American Art, SIGGRAPH, Beall Center, The Banff Centre, The Moving Image Center, Steirischer Herbst, Ars Electronica, Artist’s Space, The Guggenheim Museum New York, Incheon Digital Arts Festival South Korea, Writing Machine Collective Hong Kong, Maryland Institute College of Art, 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, Mudfish, 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 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, on the game The Sims (in Italian, Unicopli 2003).

Flanagan is the founding director of he theory/practice laboratory she founded in 2003, Tiltfactor, focused on the design of and research on computer games, board games, urban games, and other software that fosters a joyful commitment to human values. She is also the creator of “The Adventures of Josie True,” the first web-based adventure game for girls.

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 from Central Saint Martins College of Art and Design, University of the Arts London UK. Flanagan’s work has been supported by commissions, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the American Council of Learned Societies, Microsoft Research, and she has been PI or co-PI on six National Science Foundation research grants. 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. She is the Sherman Fairchild Distinguished Professor in Digital Humanities at Dartmouth College,. http://www.maryflanagan.com; http://www.tiltfactor.org.

Flanagan on wikipedia here.

Blog: the lovely GrandTextAuto.org

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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.

[phage] is an application that scans the user’s hard drive and randomly selects images, snippets of text, sounds and other content to create a continually shifting visual spatialization of the user’s information. Dredging through countless images, sound files, cached web files, and emails, the program creates a living visual and sonic memory map. These maps reflect numerous overlapping relationships and cultures: the mechanics of the machine and technology are visible through the thousands of invisible files necessary to run common software. Usually ignored and unknown to most users, these obscure bits of text and code, in the non-hierarchical selection process of [phage] are as likely to be highlighted as the family photos or downloaded articles. Artifacts from the participant’s interaction with the machine and the content stored within are also reflected in these free-form maps.

In creating continually shifting audio-visual sculptures from our own data, [phage] distributes authorship between programmer, operating system, and users. The participant experiences in surprise the contents of the computer’s memory — and by extension, revisits their own activities: a palimpsest of their life experiences emerges. [phage] questions the command and control paradigms which created the computer in the first place.  [phage] levels the playing field for every bit of data, wrestling creative control from the hierarchical tyranny of the operating system. The free form, sometimes dream-like results present a portrait equally compelling and mundane.

[phage] does not harm the user’s system and operates on the principal of bacteriophage, a type of constructive virus preying on bacteria and thought to be the most widely distributed and diverse entities in the biosphere.  Unlike bacteriophage, the digital [phage] participants must consent before allowing their system to be ‘infected’.

“Mary Flanagan’s [phage] offers an alternative visualization of electronic information–but instead of browsing the Internet, it browses your hard drive. A…program that thinks it’s a psychoanalyst, _Phage_ dredges up random images, texts, and sounds from the nooks and crannies on your C drive. You’ll be surprised what’s lurking in the depths of your computer’s unconscious.”

–Jon Ippolito, curator of Media Arts, Guggenheim Museum, NYC, 2000.

“…The human mind…operates by association. With one item in its grasp, it snaps instantly to the next that is suggested by the association of thoughts, in accordance with some intricate web of trails carried by the cells of the brain…the speed of action, the intricacy of trails, the detail of mental pictures, is awe-inspiring beyond all else in nature. Man cannot hope fully to duplicate this mental process artificially…to equal the speed and flexibility with which the mind follows an associative trail, but it should be possible to beat the mind decisively in regard to the permanence and clarity of the items resurrected from storage.”

–Vannevar Bush, As We May Think, The Atlantic Monthly, July 1945

[phage] was a winner in the DIGITAL 2000 International Competition & Exhibition sponsored by
Art & Science Collaborations, Inc. (ASCI)

net-based applet

downloadable application for pc

[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.

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.