Four computers / game engine / hardware / sound / custom code / text/

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?

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.

software / controller / computer

[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

software / sensors / computer / projection

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).

software / controller / computer
[six.circles] is an internet based, one or two player turn based networked game which explores the consequences of cooperation and competition through the construction of simple geometry objects.

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”

video, film + computer animation 1994

She Went Back is an experimental personal documentary about a family history. She Went Back, an experimental 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.

software / network / computer

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.

software / computer
[rootings] is a collection of experimental games in which player participants explore experiences of time and memory within a set of game/narratives.

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.

software / computer / performance / installation

[the perpetual bed] explores the wake world and dream world of space.

Through the lens of Flanagan’s 91 year old grandmother’s experiences when critically ill and hospitalized, the work is constructed as an online, virtual VRML world in which users can interact with each other from within a navigable, surrealistic narrative situated in the world of her grandmother’s dreamstate. A hybrid between video, interactive art, installation, and animation, the relies on the movement of the user/viewer to encounter experiences with transparent yet tangible beings, memories, and places engaged with when seeing space in alternate patterns.

Flanagan’s goal is to tell a story in an altogether new way — by allowing the user to move through a story, to “happen” upon a scene, and to find his or her own meaning in this ever-enacted place. In some versions, users can then leave their mark and become part of the story–leave hints, impressions, etc–for the next viewer. This residue becomes part of the world, ready for the next user to discover.

Please be patient during download. This version of the piece will initiate automatically. It does include sound, but in the cortona plug in, the sound is inexplicably sped up.

This project has been experienced internationally and is included in VRML-ART 2000, the only internationally juried show of VRML artwork. Other venues include the Web3D-VRML Symposium in Monterey California (2000) Siggraph (2000) and Alterites: Interdisciplinarite & Pratiques “Feminines” de l’espace Conference at Ecole d’Architecture Paris-Villemin (1999).

The Virtual Reality Modeling Language (VRML) is a file format for describing interactive 3D objects and worlds. VRML is designed to be used on the Internet, intranets, and local client systems. VRML is also intended to be a universal interchange format for integrated 3D graphics and multimedia. VRML may be used in a variety of application areas such as engineering and scientific visualization, multimedia presentations, entertainment and educational titles, web pages, and shared virtual worlds.

For more information on VRML, check out the specifications at the Web3D group, http://www.web3d.org/ .

If you would like to read more about this work, download this document.

To view this piece, you will need a plug-in for your browser that will allow you to see 3D worlds and objects created in VRML (The Virtual Reality Modeling Language.) Several will work, but I recommend the cortona plug in as cosmo player is no longer supported.

software / computer / network / installation

“Like such artist-made browsers as I/O/D’s Web Stalker and Maciej Wisniewski’s Netomat, Mary Flanagan’s _Phage_ offers an alternative visualization of electronic information–but instead of browsing the Internet, it browses your hard drive. A downloadable Director 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 June 2000 - Juror Statement, netArt 2000
artist, Curator Media Arts, Guggenheim Museum, NYC

[phage] is a computer application which is viral– an artificial life form. [phage] filters through all available material on a specified workstation and places it in an alternate context-a visible and audible moving 3D spatialized world. I encourage this virus lifeform to spread via email (but only by the consent of the host).

The project explores the permeable and viral nature of digital data and our relationship, as users, to both the data and the machine. By mapping a userâs unique experiences– through images, downloads, web sites visited, emails–the computer program creates spatial memory maps that not only reflect the computer and technoculture in content, but the user’s artifacts from his or her interactions. In this way, the [phage] program reflects each user as an individual. The work, in fact, becomes about the user’s experience with the particular computer.

see [phage] in NZ

[phage] creates new living sculptures from our own data, thus mixing ideas of authorship between programmer, operating system, and users. It eradicates gender-based notions previously associated with the life creating process, and it questions the command and control paradigms which created the computer in the first place. [phage] creates a feminist map of the machine through its non-hierarchical organization and its divorce of creative control (and reproductive control) from the user. [phage] allows the user to experience his or her computer memory as a palimpsest of his or her own life experiences rather than know the computer as simply a tool for daily use.

The title of [phage] plays upon the coded word “virus”– referring to a bacteriophage, a constructive human virus that preys on harmful bacteria. Phage, from the Greek phagein, meaning “to eat.”

[phage] was created in Macromedia Director and is available for download below. It will do no harm to your system. It takes time to scan the system at first, so have patience if you have immense hard drives. Download [phage] for pc now!

-Click here for the compressed winzip format (1.9MB, must be uncompressed to run)
-Click here for the uncompressed .exe (about 3MB)

Read paper about [phage].

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

…”The human mind does not work that way. It 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. It has other characteristics, of course; trails that are not frequently followed are prone to fade, items are not fully permanent, memory is transitory. Yet the speed of action, the intricacy of trails, the detail of mental pictures, is awe-inspiring beyond all else in nature.”

–vannevar bush, as we may think 1945

software / network

[meme.garden] (2006) is collaboratively created software which allows participants to search words, find clouds of associated words, and “plant” their word searches to create “forests” which may or may not have relationships with other participants in the system. Participants’ plants grow through time and reflect network changes through time about their interests. The [meme.garden] software was commissioned by Turbulence.org and created by Mary Flanagan, Daniel Howe, Chris Egert, Junming Mei, & Kay Chang.
[meme.garden]

This project is a VRML world which explores the story of the Chinese Goddess Matsu (also known as MaCo, Macho, Matzu, Mazoo, and Machu).

The development of the Matsu Interactive World has been funded by a grant from the Pacific Cultural Foundation.

Matsu, originally named Lin Mo Niang (silent girl) was born in 960 AD near Meizhou Bay in Fujien Province, China. She is revered by sea faring people in Mainland China, Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Singapore. Matsu has become much more than the patron saint of fishermen–she is one of the most venerated deities in the Chinese pantheon. Her birthday on the 3rd month, 23rd day of the Chinese calendar is celebrated in Taiwan’s hundreds of Matsu temples. Because she is a powerful female deity and was supposedly visited by Kuan Yin herself, she is often associated with Kuan Yin, the goddess of mercy. Matsu’s face is generally black, and her face is shaded with a beaded veil.

This project began as an attempt to capture the idea of action in dreamspace. Matsu is said to have saved her father and brother while dreaming. To create her world as a virtual experience, then, seems fitting. The computer offers us all an avenue for “out of body” agency.

The piece consists of 6 scenes or worlds. Scene 5 is a multiuser offering area where visitors can offer virtual gifts, words, prayers, or stories to the goddess. Click on the images to project offerings into the environment, or type thoughts into the world through the text area.

The scenes are animated but users are free to navigate the worlds themselves.

This project began at the National Institute of the Arts (Now Taipei National University of the Arts), Peitou, Taiwan, in January 1999. Special thanks go to SuChu Hsu who was my wonderful host while visiting NIA. Images of Pi Ying Xi (skin puppets) are from the National Institute of the Art’s Center for the Study of Traditional Arts. Some of the images which can be offered to Matsu in the offerings section are from photographer Sung Chih-Hsing. His work can be seen on the Academia Sinica website about Taiwanese culture.

is a video work examining the mundane household work of generations of women through the metaphor of a kaleidoscope.

The footage began as documentation of three generations of women in my family making holiday food–popcorn balls. The mundane imagery of hand work is transformed through formalist techniques of mirroring and duplicating.

With formal manipulation and the of the image from a rectangular video screen to a spherical projection, the imagery is transformed into abstract images that ooze of bodies and the rhythm of manual labor.

The work is desiged to be exhibited on a spherical globe and is showing at the AIR gallery, New York, on 25th Street, as well as in Siggraph 2004.

We use text so frequently in digital communication. Most technology users correspond in written word more frequently than in person conversation or telephone chats. However, we seldom stop to consider “voice” within our mundane, written correspondences.

[ineffable] is a computer application which reads aggregated emails between two correspondents and maps the use of language through the words users utilize in everyday correspondence. The project explores the question, Do we have particular “voice” in our daily writing to friends and colleagues, and does that voice change depending on who we are writing to and why?

Collaborators Mary Flanagan and Andrew Gerngross work to bring into the foreground the primary form of exchange practiced by many technology users — email — through closely examining the use of language in email systems. Email is used for work and play, intimate exchange and legal agreements. How are different kinds of language, and thus sounds, used in correspondences with different people? How do we “sound” to those reading our emails, and how does the email of others sound to us?

Words, phrases, and sentences represent a time, a person, a map of interpersonal experiences (the external world) as well the way a user relates to the context of digital communication — and relationship of that person to their own computer. This project maps the geography of these relationships with sound and image.

The [ineffable] program explores the relationship between real people through their written messages to one another, but further, the work generates a set of procedures which expose how our everyday experiences with email encode the kinds of sounds we make, our “voices,” into our digital systems.

HOW [ineffable] WORKS.
[ineffable] collects chronological information, time between emails, length of correspondence, and most importantly, the kinds of phonetic sounds used by a correspondent in his or her writing and generates a sonification and visualization of this content. Written in Java, [ineffable] analyzes a user’s emails to or from a particular person and maps the language used by examining the phonemic makeup of the words utilized in the correspondence. The work “reads” a pair of user’s email archives and, side by side, analyzes the words therein, grouping them based on the recipient, date, time elapse between correspondences, overall amount of correspondence. Most importantly, we have the program find a “sound signature” to the words used in words, paragraphs, sentences and finally, the overall email set.

[ineffable] functions as an experimental system which considers the “sound in the head” we create while reading and writing as a synaesthetic experience. The visitor to the work encounters a set of dynamic sonifications and visualizations from each set of correspondences in a split stereo sound environment.

Visualizations. The two sides of the visual aspect of the project represent the application’s reading of the email aggregate. Visual modes switch between a moving line map and a “voice organism” color collage generated by the system. The moving line map illustrates sound structures encountered by the system. It shows the frequency of the phonemes created by the email in its thickness and color. The voice organism visualizes time and the change in voice through time. It increases and decreases in complexity and transparency depending on the dates in between correspondences. The smoothness is the “consistent” state of the “voice” or the general phonemic sounds used by the system. Changes in the sound “voice” change the organism. The system generates “ideal words” that are the aggregate of a user’s most frequently used sounds. The most commonly used sounds –for example, if a writer uses many “mmm”s and “er”, generates a representative word from the sounds (in this example, the word could be “murmur”). These are displayed under the visualization and change over time.

Sonifications. In the audio aspect of the work, several audio tracks are created in response to the email data. First, phoneme sounds are assigned to an “instrument” created in the programming API Jsyn. Phonemes sampled from human voices are also played back in the rhythm of the email’s syllabic structure.

PRIOR EXHIBITION OF THIS WORK.
[ineffable] is a new work and was selected by an international jury to premier at the prestigious SIGGRAPH computer graphics conference in the Art Gallery in August 2004.

INSTALLATION DIAGRAM.
This work can utilize a monitor or video projector in its installed form. It runs off of one laptop, with a mixer and 4 speakers (and optional headphones).

ABOUT THE ARTISTS.
The project is a collaboration between New York artist-scientists Mary Flanagan and Andrew Gerngross. Flanagan’s computer and net art has been shown at the Whitney Biennial (2002), the Guggenheim Museum (2004), SIGGRAPH, and Ars Electronica. Her books include Reload: Rethinking Women + Cyberculture (MIT Press 2002) and reskin (forthcoming). She is the creator of “The Adventures of Josie True,” the first net-based adventure game for girls, and is co-director for Rapunsel, a research project to teach girls programming. http://www.maryflanagan.com. Gerngross is a full time writer and game designer with a background in filmmaking and professional software engineering, among other talents. http://www.sharedstate.com.

As system designers, we are concerned with the way computer technology permeates our everyday lives, and how our everyday lives are in turn shaped by the technologies we use. [ineffable] foregrounds digital systems we use everyday in our work and play and examines their complex relationship to language.

software / text

net-based applet

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.

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.

[giantJoystick] is a large, functioning game controller and serves as an interface to a shift in embodied experience.

[giantJoystick] explores group collaboration in play. A 10 foot tall joystick, modeled after a classic Atari 2600 joystick, is situated in the gallery or in public space in order to produce a childlike scale, to generate discussion and group play.

Players collectively navigate classic ATARI arcade games such as Asteroids and Breakout; due to the scale of the interface, however, players need to collaborate.

[giantJoystick] was commissioned by HTTP Gallery, London in 2006, and is on exhibit at Laboral Spain 2007 and the Beall Center, LA 2007; UCSD in 2008.

The Catalogue Essay about the work is available here

[double] was a one night, site specific installation created at The Timbers Motel in Eugene, OR on 23 November 2002.

room 101 [double] mary flanagan
Hotels are places where we bring bits of our lives, exist for a while in a liminal space, and move on. Sometimes moving on might be returning home, but at others, it may mean relocating to another city, entering into marriage, or even passing to the afterlife. Such transitions surely have taken place at every motel.

I have chosen to work with room 101. In George Orwell’s 1984, room 101 was the dreaded room which contained one’s deepest and darkest fears– a place where one was forced to confront the bedrock terror of one’s life. It’s peculiar, then, that The Timbers Motel strangely reminds me of my parent’s home. I grew up with identical wood paneling, for example, that is featured in my room; the décor initially struck me as identical to the taste of my parents, as though the manager and my mother andfather had shopped together for lamps, bedspreads, nightstands. In addition, I ended up with the rare smoker’s room, so this too reminds me strongly of home.

Yet I also associate the room with loss and with loneliness. Home, yet not home at all.

[double] investigates the idea of the hotel room as a site for parallel experience with one’s waking life. Sleep for a traveler is a troubled, alien sleep, an unreal and in-between experience. 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.

The twin space of the dreamer’s restless physicality and dream state is explored in this video work, which conjures a secondary duality between physical and virtual bodies and spaces in the motel. Text whispered from Calvino’s If On a Winter’s Night a Traveler…

[collection] is a networked computer application that gathers up found material from various users’ hard drives and collects them on a centralized server. Going from computer to computer, [collection] scours drives and collects bits and pieces of user’s data - sentences from emails, graphics, web browser cached images, business letters, sound files-and creates a mobile mix of user experiences, operating system files, and normally hidden materials.

The program explores a workstation’s architecture and a user’s personal history with the machine, creating this material into a moving, three dimensional, continuously shifting map which has been compared to a visible, virtual, networked collective unconscious. It also questions notions of authenticity and authorship in the digital age, breaking the conceptual line separating, for example, and emotional letter from html or a help file.

The program is downloadable for pc for all users to access. [collection] is currently downloadable in compressed (ZIP) and in uncompressed (the .EXE) form. First download the application and log in with your the name you wish your material to be identified with. The program will do the rest! Have patience while [collection] scans your hard drive for material. The larger and fuller the hard drive, the longer the search process.

[collection] is significant because it calls into question the nature of memory as a network through its allegorical use of the internet as a collective memory space. By mapping a user’s, or group of users’, unique experiences-through images, downloads, web sites visited, emails-it creates spatial memory maps that not only reflect the computer and technoculture in content, but the user’s artifacts from his or her interactions. Most software art projects are not about the user him or herself. [collection] becomes unique to the user or group of users participating, bringing long-forgotten content from the hard disk to light and reminding us that memory can sometimes be too persistent.

The software only visits users who have installed the prerequisite “transference” software so rights of privacy are not violated. No data is destroyed; the bits and snippets are copied into the ‘unconscious’ on the server.

[collection] has been exhibited onscreen and as an installation in the 2002 Whitney Biennial, Barcelona, and Sydney among other venues.

Career Moves explores the contradictory world of women in corporate America througan interactive, computer controlled board game.

Work is a troubling condition internationally for all women. Women represent 50 per cent of the world adult population and one-third of the official labour force, but they perform nearly two-thirds of all work hours, receive one-tenth of the world income and own less than 1 per cent of the world’s property. Much women’s work is not officially recognized and does not entitle them to any remuneration, respect or rights usually associated with work (UNESCO).

The game itself represents several aspects of women and work under a variety of conditions, from menial jobs to corporate spaces. Many plastic items are embedded into the game board, representin accoutrements of “success.” Players typically take turns moving their game pieces around the board using the die. Upon landing on a space occupied with an object, players use tongs to retrieve the object. If the player falters or touches the side of the board with the tongs, he or she hears sampled voice sources taken from the career coaching and self-help industry directed at women, groups feeding off of social change by offering patronizing and constrictive advice to women caught in flux. The sampled dialogue presents a tangled web of contradictory statements about women, work, and agency.

The communal aspect of playing the game is intended to be part of the work: because the game appears at first look to be a commercial-style game, players begin in the spot on the board accordingly marked. This commercial style is intended as a critique of the historical sequence to which the popular board game belongs: many games have traditionally supported social “norms,” including heterosexuality, consumerism, and especially non-liberatory positions for women. However, as players progress down the board, it becomes clear that it is they themselves who are determining the rules of the game, and the collective and individual goals become apparent. This not only turns the collective experience and memory of such “family” style activities around, but turns the game experience into a collaborative rewriting of such conventions by calling into question the very motivation behind such goals.

Collective creation, to Levi-Strauss, involves forming commonly understood rule-goverened semantic systems to make objects, especially art objects, accessible to the community. When players begin to define and defend the game as they play it, a dialogue opens about consumption, work, and the political and economic machinery behind the production of a relatively innocent-looking pasttime. Thus the work is best seen in settings, where groups can take turns experiencing and creating their own semantic system.

Physical specifications:
Gameboard is 20″x 30″, controlled by a pc laptop
Game kit includes: two sets of headphones, die, player pieces, corporate objects for removal
Game sits on table, provided, or within the site

created by Mary Flanagan, Wu Fu Che, + Ho Chien Chang

Cyberspace is a socially - mediated construction, made clear through the use of avatars, or personal representations in virtual worlds. By putting ourselves into digital worlds, we lose the self and become one with virtual spaces’ new elements. It seems that an aspect of identity is released as an electronic element … By putting ourselves into digitally constructed realities, we call into question the nature of the self in a digital culture and the ways the new selves are created. What are the elements which construct that reality? What is our relationship with the virtual personae and figures we create in online space? What is our relationship to our own data, our bodies sampled with the latest digital technology?

But what is, in fact, natural? Digital culture’s dominance, and ultimately, construction of landscapes and bodies has been a way to create new cosmologies, new elements. The creation and discovery of elements is a fundamentally human endeavor, as are the creations of new systems of representation, identities, and experiences in VR. We work to abstract and distort reality in order to apprehend it. Like language, we name, categorize, and quantify our surroundings.

[unnatural elements] presents images of researcher|artists from Taiwan and the USA which demonstrate that the conversion from the image of the physical body to the image of the virtual is not the typical smooth computational process as Hollywood would have us believe.

The images featured in [unnatural elements] show the effects of the creation of a digital nature and digital elements. Most researchers working in 3D technologies strive for “perfection.” However, our team was interested in sampling one real and watching the translation between earthbound identites and virtual ones. What would human data create in cyberspace? The images were created by using 3D head scans of the artists from composited images produced by a video camera and stitching them together in custom software. Interestingly, the process generated “natural” eruptions inherent to the heads, and each scan seemed to take on forms reminiscent of “natural” eruptions we see in earth, fire, water, and wind.

Here, our new bodies erupt with artifacts and take on unexpected resemblances to earthbound natural elements. The”random” patterns we see in rocks, water, and other natural elements are not random at all but naturally occurring algorithms. Thus the computer, in creating artifacts, is effectively doing nature’s work. In a sense the computer is much more “real” (disturbingly so) than WE are - when it creates artifacts it is acting on “natural” algorithms.

Offering us a way to critically examine the body in cyberspace and our conventions and ideals of interactive avatars and the drive for 3D art “realism,” these pieces work to provoke a dialogue about the real and “natural” our media is trying so desperately to produce in digital space.

This collaboration was made possible by funding from the U.S. Fulbright Scholar Program and the Foundation for Scholarly Exchange, 2001, and took place in Dr. Ming Ouyoung’s CML, NTU, Taiwan.

Clothing and Embroidery Performance/Installation Installation at Georgia Institute of Technology’s Skiles Gallery. For five weeks, Flanagan played the military recruiting game America’s Army in the gallery and sewed the scenes, characters, and interfaces with which she interacted.

[from the ranks] is a series of images and texts reflecting on the role of the military in everyday US culture as seen in computer-created imagery. Computer images, rendered with the iconography and technique of embroidery, give a homespun texture to digital environments and systems. Here, computer - based images are indistinguishable from sewn materials generated by the human hand. These images are truely a product of domestic technologies however.

The use of a computer driven sewing machine serves to make this link from digital to analog. Perhaps this shift in imaging - from the virtual to the real - is analagous to Virilio’s claim that “many strategists said that it was easier to understand the Gulf War by buying American video games than by watching the news on television. In a certain sense, they were right. We didn’t see concrete events—how the ground troops broke through the Iraqi border, for example—but we did see war transformed into a video game, with the same image repeated over and over: a weapon hitting its target” (Sans 2000, par 25).

The collected works are a series of images, texts, and objects that engage with the role of the military in my everyday life, from the standardized tests and recruitment visits to family memorabilia, and how contemporary feelings about these experiences are discovered in contemporary computer-based images.

___________
I started playing the game America’s Army again in early 2007 with a renewed curiosity, really, about “the rest of America,” particularly the South and the Atlanta area, where I was a resident visiting artist for the month. The Atlanta area is is home to Moody Air Force Base, Fort Gillem, Fort McPherson, Dobbins Air Reserve Base, and the Atlanta Naval Air Station. The proximity of these military bases, coupled with the fact that most enlistees come from the South (40 percent) (Tyson 2005) and the daily events in the Middle East were external factors.

At the time, my niece and her husband were in the Air Force, raising their newborn baby on base. I am from a family of “enlisted people,” though curiously, the military and war was never much a part of everyday conversation. Many family members have served in the armed forces: my Father and his four brothers served in various branches, from Navy to Air Force. My Uncle was an Army medic in Vietnam, my brother is a retired Marine. My great, great maternal grandfather was an Army cook in the Civil War. And while my maternal grandfather did not serve due to his age and timing of wars, he worked at the defense plant in Baraboo WI making ammunition. Relatives say that my great great paternal grandfather and one of his sons were killed by the British for their work with what was to become the IRA.

Though personally quite anti-war, I never really questioned taking the The Armed Forces Vocational Aptitude Battery (ASVAB) in High School. It was the closest thing I had heard of to an IQ test. The test seemed in fact more relevant in the context of the rural midwest, where a steady, reliable job is of utmost importance, than, for example, higher education entrance exams.

references

Sans, Jérôme (2000) “The Game of Love and Chance: A Discussion with Paul Virilio.” Available Online: http://www.watsoninstitute.org/infopeace/vy2k/sans.cfm.

Tyson, Ann Scott (4 Nov 2005) “Youths in Rural U.S. Are Drawn To Military.” The Washington Post. Available Online: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/11/03/AR2005110302528.html
Accessed 15 January 2007.

software / paper / models / computer

[arborescence] is an interactive installation that uses the metaphor of the tree to create an environment for searching with collaboratively created software.

[arborescence] is an installation environment which explores the space and language of an individual’s interests among linked, grassroots internet sites. The participant enters search terms and watches virtual trees form on the screen– the type of tree or leaf is based on the type of word or theme they are searching for.

The [meme.garden] software included in the exhibition allows participants to search words, find clouds of associated words, and “plant” their word searches and created forests which may or may not have relationships with others in the system. Participants’ plants grow through time and reflect network changes through time about their interests. The physical environment of the installation encourages participants to explore the myriad shapes and sizes of leaves used.

In its exploration of time, space, and language, [arborescence] makes physical the internet customs of searching, tagging, and streaming RSS feeds, and does so by creating a contextual timscape in which interests grow and change over time.

The [meme.garden] software was commissioned by Turbulence.org and created by Mary Flanagan, Daniel Howe, Chris Egert, Junming Mei, & Kay Chang.