UPCOMING
2011
Mid January / Exhibition with the Writing Machine Collective, Hong Kong
2010
October 8,9,10 / Speaking at Indiecade
September 6-7 / Trinity College Dublin
August 13-14/ Games for Girls WorkshopChicago
info{at}maryflanagan{dot}com
PAST
2010
May 24/ Games for Change Games 101 Workshop NYC, at Parsons/The New School
May 14/ Digital Humanities Symposium at Dartmouth College Hanover NH
June 7-9 / Trinity College Dublin
May 6-7 / Values in Design Workshop NYC, at NYU
April 12-16 / Keynote Speaker DIGITEL 2010 Taiwan, The IEEE 3rd International Conference on Digital Game and Intelligent Toy Enhanced Learning
March 14th / Keynote Speaker, Playing the City/Giocando la città, Modena Italia
2009
November 16 / Montreal International Games Summit panel
November 2 /MIT Gambit Lab and in the Purple Blurb lecture series
November 3 / Hood Museum Gallery Talk, Hanover NH
August 2009 / Show of perfect.city
South Korea
May 27-29 / Games for Change
March 27-April 1 / I will be in Hong Kong giving a series of consultations and talks
March 23-27 / Game Developers Conference 2009
March / L.A. Alumni group talk
February 2009 / Talk at the Transart Institute
2008
November / Talk at RISD
November / Talk at DIGRA NYC
October 30 - Nov 3 / Talk at Computer Space, Sophia Bulgaria
October 17 - 19 / Keynote at Future and Reality of Gaming
Sept 13 2008 / Massively Multiplayer Game Launch @ Conflux Festival
August / UC-Santa Clara Values in Design Workshop
July / Games, Learning and Society workshop
June / Games for Change NYC Panel
May / V2 Lab Talk, Rotterdam
April / Cornell Talk
March / Brooklyn Poly Panel
March / AERA Panel
February / GameLab Talk NYU
February / GDC Panel
January / Savannah Talk
January / Georgia Tech Talk
2007
October / Cinekids talk, Amsterdam
October 4 / Beall Center exhibition with GrandTextAuto folks
September 24-28 / Presentation of “A Method For Discovering Issues Around Values in Digital Games” at Digital Games Research Association (DIGRA), Tokyo
September / Presentation of “Locating Play and Politics: Real World Games and Political Action” at The Digital Arts and Culture Conference, Perth Australia
July / Maine College of Art visiting artist
June / MacDowell Colony Residency, New Hampshire
April / Game Design Heuristics for Activist Games, Full Paper, CHI (Computer Human Interaction Conf.)
April / Women in Games Conference, UK
April / Artists Talk, Rutgers University
April / Heading in Different Directions, Emerging Terrain in Games and Simulation Symposium, RPI
April / Artists Talk, University of Wisconsin Milwaukee Film Program
March / Artists Talk, School of Visual Arts March
March / eVALUating Games, NYU Workshop, NYC
March / [giantJoystick] in Feedbach, [domestic] in Gameworld, Laboral Art Center Inaugeral Show, Asturias Spain
February / Feminist Visualities conference, Cornell University
January / Graduate Colloquium and Exhibition Talk, Georgia Institute of Technology January
2006
December / Women Making Science: Problem, Progress, Power with The Feminist Press
June / panel organizer, “Trailblazers” at Games for Change conference, NYC
April-Maydistinguished visiting scholar at BTH Blekinge Institute of Technology, Sweden
April / Keynote Speaker, Code Conference Miami Ohio University
April / Artist’s presentation at the Neuberger Museum of Art
March / Serious Play presentation and Panel organizer, Serious Games Summit, GDC
March / Presentation at Living Game Worlds: Design Processes and the Future of Expressive Computing, Georgia Tech
January / American Folk Art Museum Panel, “I Taught Myself Everything I Know: Autodidacticism in New Media Art” organized by Mark Tribe, Brown U.,
December 2005 - 2006 / Residency, creative material group Portland Oregon
Speaker at College Art Association, Boston
Guest speaker at Columbia University, Women in Computing, NYC
The Virtual 2006: designing digital experience, Södertörn University, Stockholm
Nordic Games Conference, Malmo Sweden
exhibition of [giantJoystick] at HTTP gallery, London
Premier of collaborative work on Turbulence
Reading of e-texts in October
Artist’s Talk, Bowling Green State Univ. Ohio in conjunction with gallery installation
2005
October / Microwave International Media Festival Exhibition, Hong Kong
September / AIGA Design conference
June 1-10 / Guest and Keynoter at ICT summer school, Stockholm
April / Juror for Southshore Arts Center TechArt II show, part of Cyberarts Boston
March / keynote speaker at U FL games conference
February / juror on the New York State Foundation for the Arts grant program
February / speaking at St. Louis Museum
February / showing [domestic] at ARCO in Milan
Residency in December at iPark, CT
UW-Milwaukee Film Program Colloquia inaugeral speaker for critical studies program
two papers given at DIGRA
conference in Vancouver
speaking about game design for girls at the Btween International Festival in the uk, http://www.btween.co.uk/
Co-curating an art and games show to coincide with digra spring 2005
visiting speaker/visiting critic this spring at Pace University, Parsons, Georgia Tech, MassArt, nd Stockton College in New Jersey
2004
November / I’ve just been to UNIVERSITÉ PARIS IV-SORBONNE to give a paper called “Playculture: Work, Leisure, and the Digital Vernacular” at the Leisure and Liberty in North America conference
2003-2004 / I was an invited speaker at the Inter Society of Electronic Arts conference in Helsinki, University of Auckland (multiple engagements), Emerson college, Columbia University, The Art Institute of Chicago, MIT Media Lab, the Plaything Conference Keynote speaker in Sydney Australia, and the NY Law School. Upcoming engagements include University of Maine, St. Louis Center for Contemporary Art, the Steirischer Herbst festival in Austria, the British HCI conference, + the Sorbonne in Paris, among others.
October 2004 / showed work and speaking at the steirischer herbst festival in Graz Austria.
Sept 2004 / spoke at the University of Maine, “Code & Creativity IV Games: Making & Unmaking the World.”
August / Talk with collaborator ken perlin at InterSociety of Electronic Arts (ISEA) conference, Helsinki, “Cultural Softwares: Artistic Tools & DIY Networks;”
August / [ineffable] at siggraph
August / invited to BANFF canada new media summit/thinktank on mobile technologies
July / speaking at Teacher Institute for Contemporary Art at the Chicago Art Institute
June-July / [domestic] @GiganticArtSpace, NYC
June / National Womens Studies Assn conf panel
April / University of Auckland International Strategic Opportunities and Research Collaborations visit
Also article on subversive use of computer games going online at the New York Law School Review (peer reviewed journal) www.nyls.edu/lawreview
March 18 - May 16 / [phage] at the Guggenheim, Seeing Double show, panel discussion May 8th
March 24 / Presidential Roundtable, Gender and Computer Games
March 17 / Talk at Emerson College
Talk at Columbia’s Digital Media center
2003
Visit to Mitch Resnick’s Lifelong Kindergargen program, MIT Media Lab
Plaything, Sydney Australia October - premiere of [domestic] game project
December / Artist’s talk, UC-Colorado Springs
November 4-6DiGRA Conference in Utrecht
May 19 - 23 / Showing work at the Digital Arts and Culture Conference, Melbourne
May 19 / [search] opening
May / Visiting Artist and Artist Presentation, State Library of Victoria, Melbourne, Australia
April 16-19 / “SIMple and Personal: Domestic Spaces and The Sims” Joint meeting of the Popular Culture and American Culture Associations, New Orleans
Feb 27 - Mar 1 / “[search]-ing” 9th Biennial Symposium for Arts and TechnologyAmmerman Center for Arts and Technology at Connecticut College
February 7 - 9 / INTERACTIVE FUTURES: New Stories, New Visions Victoria Independent Film and Video Festival - http://www.vifvf.com/ University of Victoria, British Columbia, Canada
The State of Play: Panel at NY Law School
Harvestworks Residency
NY Law School-Information Society Project at Yale Law School State of Play conf
Carbon Versus Silicon: Thinking Small/Thinking Fast Banff New Media Summit
2002
December / Co-host at Melinda Rackham’s subtle.net
November 23 / 2002 [contamination] installation at MotelHaus, Eugene OR
November / Artist talk at U Washington
October 10 - 16 / [phage] at the Moving Image Center, Auckland
July - Aug / The Physics Room, New Zealand- Installation
May / Showed work + gave talk at Experimenting Arts and Sciences Conference, Aarhus Denmark
April / Showed work in “Northwest Documenta” in Salem OR showcasing Pacific NW contemporary art
February 7 - 9 / Gave a paper “The ‘Nature’ of Networks: Space and Place in the ‘Silicon Forest’” at the Nature and Progress: Interactions, Exclusions, Mutations Conference, University of Paris-Sorbonne
[remotion] Internet Artwork at CODEDOC, Whitney Artport
[search] Internet Artwork premiers “Mapping Transitions” exhibit, University of Colorado, Boulder
FutureScreen 2002 Sydney Australia - in the “all star data mappers” show
[collection] in the Whitney Biennial
2001
Santa Cruz Art League showcases work in arts and technology show
Talk at the UAAC in Montreal in October about transgenic art and feminism
September / [rootings] premiering at turbulence.org website
August / Showed [collection] at The Banff Centre New Media Institute
April - July / Visiting Professor, Interactive Artist Computer Science + Information Engineering, National Taiwan University, No. 1 Sec. 4 Roosevelt Rd, TaipeiWork on multidisciplinary human-computer interface projects
March / “Artist’s Talk” Reina Sophia Museo Nacional Centro de Arte, Madrid
January 21 / [The Perpetual Bed] Stuttgart Filmwinter Special 3D exhibition, Stuttgart Germany
February 28-March 3 / College Art Association, “The Surreal, the Hyperreal, and the Virtually Real” Panel Participant
2000
June - December / DIGITAL2000: International Competition and Exhibition New York and Philadelphia. The exhibition of the winning works will travel to the following venues: Central Fine Arts Gallery in SoHo, NYC, the Technology Gallery at The New York Hall of Science (NYHOS) (Sept.18-Nov.26), and Silicon Gallery in Philadelphia (Dec.1-31). Showing [phage]. Juror: John Ippolito, Guggenheim.
July 23-28 / Siggraph 2000 New Orleans
July 22-27 / work going to be at VRML show at Art Gallery at Siggraph 2000, New Orleans
August 2- 4 / Digital Arts & Culture Conference, Bergen Norway showing installation
21-24 February / ACM SIGGRAPH sponsored Web3D/VRML Symposium Monterey, CA, USA
VRML Art 2000 - VRML-ART 2000 shows important advances in the content and structure possible in the Web 3D medium. The works amplify a new wave of creative output by artists and designers, who have specialized on internet
February 21-24 / Web3D-VRML 2000 Monterey, CA, USA
April 14 - 15 / Urban Girls Conference, Buffalo NY
May 21-27 / 6th annual Computer Arts Festival, Maribor, Slovenia
An interview with Vermont television about Metadata games;
also here
With E. Navas for a gallery show at CalIT2
In a Podcast with MIT for Critical Play
Speaking in podcast with the Brainy Gamer
Documented in video during her workshop at Games 4 Change conference in New York
Caught the 2008 SXSWi conference in Austin TX
In an artist’s talk at Columbia University, and
Glimpsed in a video about a nifty robot show she co-curated in 2004.
2009
I.D. The International Design Magazine /
October 2009
Slam Multimedia (in German) /
October 2009
Dartmouth Professor Creates Recession-Inspired Video Game. Wired Campus: Chronicle of Higher Education. /
March 2009
Games Magazine /
October 2009
Labeling Library Archives Is a Game at Dartmouth College by Marc Beja /
August 2009
2008
FLYP / Move over Whitman, there’s a new poetry in town
by Chris Bravo & Lindsey Schneider
Nashua telegraph / New endowed humanities professor at Dartmouth has got game
by Dave Brooks
NotesOnGameDev / Mary Flanagan: Designer, Tiltfactor
by Beth A. Dillon
How Video Games Can Help in the Classroom, and in the World, Chronicle of Higher Education/ Mary Flanagan: Designer, Tiltfactor
by David Debolt
Concord Monitor / ‘Social activist’ with a joystick
by Martin Downs
2007
El Comercio, Spain / Por fin, un museo del siglo XXI Part 1, Part 2
by Miguel Moran Gijon
Nueva Espana, Spain / El motor del la Ciudad de la Cultura se pone en marcha
El Mundo, Spain / La Laboral pone a Gijon en vanguardia
by Patricia Del Gallo
ABC, Spain / Gijon apuesta por el arte y la tecnologia con un pionero laboratorio de ideas
by Natividad Puldo
La Razon, Spain / Los videojuegos ganan la partida al arte
by J. Ors
La Voz de Asturias / Laboratorio para el arte
by Blanca A. Gutierrez
[giantJoystick] featured at Indycade 2007
2006
Mary Flanagan featured in “8 Bit”, a documentary film about art and video games
ABC News / Turning 8-bit Video Games Into Art (video)
We Make Money Not Art / [giantJoystick] review
by Regine
Make Magazine / [giantJoystick] Review
The Guardian UK / Giant Joystick on Exhibition in UK
GAMASUTRA / Event Wrap Up: Girls ‘N’ Games
by Beth A. Dillon
ineffable in New Media Art
by Mark Tribe (Editor), Reena Jana (Editor), Uta Grosenick (Editor)
Rhizome / A new Play-List
by Irene Wu
BBC Online / The Taking Part that counts!
by Ryan O’Riordan
Make Magazine Online / Giant Atari 2600 Joystick
Entry posted in Blog by Phillip Torrone
Creative Europe / Game/Play
Entry posted by Gillian White
Aeropause / Giant Atari Joystick
Bernie DeKovan, Of Art and Fun / The Game/Play Blog
Posted by Pat Kane
Weird Gizmos / Top 5 Strangest Atari Gadgets
Posted by Tina
Gay Gamer / Joystick Envy
Resonance / Micro Clear Spot (radio)
15 min slot on Tuesday 15 September at 13.45
Haringey Gazette / week 31
National Newspaper Supplement
Guardian Guide North and London / Preview
by Robert Clark
National Art and Architecture Magazine
Saturday 29 July 2006
Blueprint Review
October 2006 issue
2005
neural.it / ineffable review
by Eleonora Calvelli
2003
Fine Art Forum / reload Review
by Linda Carolli
Syndey Morning Herald, Australia / Quite Contrary
by Jacqui Taffel
2002
Newsweek / Are Museums Obsolete?
by Michael Rodgers
Eugene Weekly / The Space Between Edges
by Lois Wadsworth
k Reviews Archive / Reload: Rethinking Women + Cyberculture
Reviewed by Michael R. Mosher
Afterimage / Reloading Cyberfeminism. - Reload: Rethinking Women and Cyberculture - book review
by Katie Mondloch
The New York Times / Never Mind the Art Police, These Six Matter
by Holland Cotter
I Love You Virus Show / Virus Charms and Self-Creating Code
by Alessandro Ludovico
Looking for Art in All the Wrong Places
by Jon Ippolito & Joline Blais
2000
The Montreal Gazette /
True Role Model in Cyberspace: University Professor invents Free Internet Game to Empower Young Girls.
By Kate Swoger
2nd November 2000
The Chronicle of Higher Education / Professor Creates a Web-Based Game for Girls
By Nina Willdorf
1999
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.
[double]
2002
Hotels are places where we bring bits of our lives, exist for a while in their liminal space, and move on. Sometimes moving on means returning home. Or it may mean relocating to another city, entering into marriage or even passing into the afterlife. Such transitions take place at every motel.
Sleep in such places is a troubled, alien sleep, an unreal and in-between experience. We wake unsure where we are or whether we are still dreaming. The dual life of a traveler — the sometimes-mirrored relationship between waking and dreaming — is enduringly present; even registering for the ‘double’ room reminds the traveler of this fact. Moreover, each room tends to be almost identical, doubles of themselves in an endless chain.
[double] was a site specific video installation at The Timbers Motel in Eugene, Oregon, taking place on November 23, 2002. The viewer entered room 101 of the motel where a life-size image of a slumbering woman, in a long white sleeping gown, was projected directly on the surface of a motel bed. The woman tosses and turns restlessly while a man’s voice slowly whispers passages from Italo Calvino’s If On a Winter’s Night a Traveler. The installation examines the motel room as a site for parallel experiences between waking and sleeping life. The twin space of the sleeping woman’s restless physicality and her dream state conjures a duality between physical and virtual bodies and additional ‘doubling’ within the spaces, seen or imagined, throughout the motel.
