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
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.
—Eric Zimmerman, game designer and co-author of Rules of Play
“Mary Flanagan has written a marvelous book in Critical Play. As an artist and scholar, Flanagan examines play through sources that range from the Mexican Revolution of 1910 and Johan Huizinga to Marcel Duchamp and the often-overlooked Roger Caillois. Flanagan examines games and play from dollhouses to board games, from Alberto Giacometti to Fluxus, enabling us to see what it is that makes play critical. The core issue of the book is creating forms of play that ask important questions about human life. After a grand romp through the territory and history of play, Flanagan provides a crisp practical theory in her game design model. What a book! I’m ready to shake the dice and start again.”
—Ken Friedman, Professor, Dean, Faculty of Design Swinburne University of Technology, Australia
CRITICAL PLAY: RADICAL GAME DESIGN
2009
For many players, games are entertainment, diversion, relaxation, fantasy. But what if certain games were something more than this, providing not only outlets for entertainment but a means for creative expression, instruments for conceptual thinking, or tools for social change? In Critical Play, artist and game designer Mary Flanagan examines alternative games—games that challenge the accepted norms embedded within the gaming industry—and argues that games designed by artists and activists are reshaping everyday game culture.
Flanagan provides a lively historical context for critical play through twentieth-century art movements, connecting subversive game design to subversive art: her examples of “playing house” include Dadaist puppet shows and The Sims; her discussion of language play includes puns, palindromes, Yoko Ono’s Instruction Paintings, and Jenny Holzer’s messages in LED. Flanagan also looks at artists’ alternative computer-based games, examining projects from Persuasive Games and Gonazalo Frasca and other games created through the use of interventionist strategies in the design process. And she explores games for change, considering the way activist concerns—among them Darfur, worldwide poverty, and AIDS—can be incorporated into game design.
Arguing that this kind of conscious practice—which now constitutes the avant-garde of the computer game medium—can inspire new working methods for designers, Flanagan offers a model for designing that will encourage the subversion of popular gaming tropes through new styles of game making, and proposes a theory of alternate game design that focuses on the reworking of contemporary popular game practices.
Read the first chapter and see more at the MIT Press website.
re:skin
2006
re:skin is a collection of fiction and theory engaging with issues that surround the technological manipulation of the body. From plastic surgery to fur implants, from illegal tattooing to skin grafts, the use of technology to alter the physical body is, for women writers, less a tool for empowerment than a means to construct alternative, multiple selves. Bodily boundaries are malleable, and bodily markers which distinguish bodies are reprogrammable. The pieces gathered reskin claim that the technologically mutable body is neither simply liberating nor limiting, but offers instead narratives of ways of living in, and adapting to, a technological culture.
Preview the table of contents, and see more at the MIT Press website.
reload: rethinking women + cyberculture.
2006
Cambridge MIT Press, 2002
The co-edited collection reload is a volume which mixes
women’s cyberpunk fiction with theoretical investigations into
cybercultural aspects such as web communities, fan culture, subjectivity in computer games, cinematic representations of cyborgs, and artists’ technological projects. MIT Press website
Similitudini. Simboli. Simulacri:(SIMilarities, Symbols, Simulacra)
Bittanti, Matteo + Flanagan, Mary
Milan: Edizioni Unicopli, 2003
This co-authored book, in Italian, explores domestic space, player experience, and the fan culture of The Sims.
Exploring the Creative Potential of Values Conscious Design: Students’ Experiences with the VAP Curriculum.
with Jonathan Belman (in press). Eludamos: Journal for Computer Game Culture
Designing Games to Foster Empathy.
Cognitive Technology, 14(2).
with Jonathan Belman (in press).
Instructional Methods and Curricula for Values Conscious Design.
Loading: The Official Journal of the Canadian Games Studies Association, 3(4).
with Jonathan Belman and Helen Nissenbaum (2009).
Play, Participation, and Art: Blurring the Edges.
Context Providers.
Margot Lovejoy, Christiane Paul, Victoria Vesna, eds. Bristol, UK: Intellect Press, 2010
Anxiety, Openness, and Activist Games: A Case Study for Critical Play.
with Anna Lotko
Proceedings of the Digital Games Research Association, Uxbridge UK, 2009
A private correspondence to David Theurer: Written by H. P. Lovecraft, 12th January 1919, released by Mary D. Flanagan.
Well Played.
Drew Davidson, ed. Pittsburgh: Carnegie Mellon/ ETC Press, 2009
The Sims: Suburban Utopias.
Space Time Play. Synergies Between Computer Games, Architecture and Urbanism
Birkhäuser Publishing, Basel Boston Berlin, 2007
RAPUNSEL: How a computer game designed based on educational theory can improve girls’ self-efficacy and self-esteem.
Proceedings of the American Educational Research Association
Plass, J. L, Goldman, R., Flanagan, M., Diamond, J., Dong, C., Looui, S., Hyuksoon Song, H., Rosalia, C. & Perlin, K.
Chicago, April 2007
Locating Play and Politics: Real World Games and Political Action
Proceedings of the Digital Arts and Culture Conference
Perth Australia Dec 2007
A Game Design Methodology to Incorporate Social Activist Themes.
Proceedings of CHI 2007
Flanagan, Mary, and Nissenbaum, Helen.
New York, NY: ACM Press, 181 - 190
Rethinking the F Word: A Review of Activist Art on the Internet
National Women’s Studies Association Journal (Special Issue: Feminist Activist Art) Volume 19, Number 1
Flanagan, Mary and Looui, Suyin
Spring 2007, 181-200
Feminist Art Activist Roundtable
National Women’s Studies Association Journal (Special Issue: Feminist Activist Art)
Volume 19, Number 1, Spring 2007.
My Profile, Myself in Playculture
Exploring Digital Artefacts
Johan Bornebusch and Patrik Hernwall, Editors. M3 Publication, 2006, 20-29
Making Games for Social Change
AI & Society: The Journal of Human-Centered Systems
Springer London: Springer, 20(1), January 2006
The ‘Nature’ of Networks: Space and Place in the Silicon Forest
Nature et progrès : interactions, exclusions, mutations
Ed. Pierre Lagayette. Paris : Presses de l’Université. Paris-Sorbonne, 2006
New Design Methods for Activist Gaming
Proceedings from DiGRA 2005
Mary Flanagan, D.C. Howe, Helen Nissenbaum
16-20 June, Vancouver, BC, Canada
Troubling ‘Games for Girls’: Notes from the Edge of Game Design
Proceedings from DiGRA 2005
16-20 June, Vancouver, BC, Canada
Values at Play: Design Tradeoffs in Socially-Oriented Game Design
Proceedings of the CHI 2005 conference on Human factors in computing systems
Mary Flanagan, D.C. Howe, Helen Nissenbaum
CHI 2005, 2-7 April, Portland, Oregon
Une Maison de Poupee Virtuelle Capitaliste? The Sims: Domesticite, Consommation, et Feminite
Consommations & Sociétés: Cahiers pluridisciplinaire sur la consommation et l’interculturel
Ed. Mélanie Roustan et Dominique Desjeux
the bride stripped bare to her Data: information flow and digibodies
Data Made Flesh
Thurtle et al. 2003
Next Level: Women’s Digital Activism through Gaming
Digital Media Revisited
Edited by Andrew Morrison, Gunnar Liestøl & Terje Rasmussen, Cambridge: MIT Press, 2003, 359 - 388
Developing Virtual Performance Spaces
American Puppetry
Ed. Phyllis T. Dircks. New York: Theatre Library Association, 2004
Hyperbodies, Hyperknowledge: Women in Games, Women in Cyberpunk, and Strategies of Resistance
reload: rethinking women + cyberculture
Cambridge: MIT Press, 2002, 425-454
navigable narratives: gender +narrative spatiality in virtual worlds
Art Journal
Vol 59 no. 3, Fall 2000, 74 - 85
Response to Celia Pearce: About Computer Gaming
First Person
Ed. Noah Wardrip-Fruin and Pat Harrigan. Cambridge: MIT Press
Mobile Identities, Digital Stars, & Post-Cinematic Selves
Wide Angle: Issue on Digitality & the Memory of Cinema
21:3, 1999
Digital Stars Are Here to Stay
convergence: the journal of research into new media technologies
Eds. Julia Knight + Alexis Weedon, University of Luton, Summer 1999. Print and Internet
Spatialized MagnoMemories
Culture Machine 3 - Virologies: Culture and Contamination
Eds. David Boothroyd and Gary Hall. 2001
[xyz]
2009
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?
[ineffable]
2005
Email is now so pervasive and so essential to our lives that it’s difficult to remember how we communicated prior to its emergence. The ramifications of the nearly wholesale replacement of our physical voice with a detached written text continues to be felt everywhere email is used, whether connected to work or play, intimate exchange or legal agreements. How do we sound to those reading our emails, and how does the email from others sound to us? How do these voices shift when the recipient or the subject matter changes, and why?
As system designers, we are interested in the myriad of ways computer technology permeates and shapes our everyday lives. Email, easily the most widely used and standardized form of new media communication, has changed us in ways we are only beginning to examine, particularly in its complex effect on our relationship to language.
[ineffable] is a computer application which interprets emails between two correspondents and creates audio and visual ‘maps’ of language from the words used. The program reveals how our repeated phrases and stock answers encode the kinds of sounds we make, exposing the varied ‘voices’ we employ within the digital realm. The aggregate of our message’s phrases and the timeline in which they are sent and received constitute a potential map of interpersonal experiences (the external world) as well as how the user relates to the context of digital communication. The program uses all of these factors to generate distinctive portraits of our day to day communication. It functions as an experimental system which reconstitutes the “sound in one’s head” created when reading and writing as a synaesthetic experience. The viewer encounters a set of dynamic sonifications and visualizations from each set of correspondences in a split stereo sound environment.
HOW [ineffable] WORKS:
The application analyzes multiple factors from a cache of email messages. In addition to using the words, it also examines the chronology (including frequency and gaps between messages) as well as the length of each communication. [ineffable] then creates a pair of digitally animated maps representing each half of the conversation, switching 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 the line’s thickness and color. The program’s 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. Consistency of the ’sound voice’ results in a consistent visual mapping, as derived from the general phonemic sounds found by the system. Changes in the ’sound voice’ change the organism. The program also locates ’sound signatures’ within the texts and generates a representative word from the aggregate of a user’s most frequently used sounds. For example, if a writer uses many “mmm”s and “ers” the word generated could be “murmur”. These are displayed under the visualization and change over time.
To generate the audio component, several 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.
{it is unnecessary to add info here about you, as it’s available elsewhere on the site. Info on your collaborator is more relevent}:
COLLABORATORS:
This project is a collaboration between New York artist-scientists Mary Flanagan and Andrew Gerngross. Gerngross is a full time writer with a background in film-making and software engineering, among other talents.
[ineffable] premiered at the SIGGRAPH computer graphics Art Gallery in August 2004.
Career Moves
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
