Mary Flanagan: Difference between revisions

Mary Flanagan is an artist, author, educator, and designer currently residing in New York City. She is an associate professor in the Film and Media department at Hunter College and the director of the Tiltfactor Lab, an activist game design group. Her art has been exhibited around the world and she was featured in the videogame art documentary 8 BIT. Within the field of culture and technology, she is known for her theory of playculture[1].

Artwork

Flanagan's artwork deals primarily with technology and what its design and use reveal about society. Through sculpture, video game mods, and networked databases she investigates how human relationships manifest in and are influenced by the technological artifacts that permeate the modern world. Other work is concerned with cyber-feminism and the representation of women in cyberculture. Most recently giantJoystick, a ten-foot-tall working joystick designed for collaborative play of Atari 2600 games. It appeared in the 2007 show Feedback at the Laboral Art Center, Spain. [2] [domestic] [3] is a hack of Unreal Tournament 2003 combining elements of digital narrative and video game play to address Flanagan's childhood experience of a house fire and issues of memory and location. It was featured in the book New Media Art. Perhaps her most famous pieces are [phage][4] and [collection]. "[phage] functions by charting a computer hard drive‘s unique movements - through internet downloads, web sites visited, images and emails stored. The computer drives the artwork as a self-propelled artificial organism, filtering through all available material on the hard drive and morphing it into a floating-3D-computer world. In this way [phage] reflects not only the computer user’s technoculture, but also mementoes from his or her interactions."[5] [collection] is a similar program that networks and displays the contents of multiple computers. It has been shown in Sydney, Barcelona, and the 2002 Whiteny Biennial[6].

Writing

Most recently, Flanagan and Austin Booth co-edited re:skin a collection of fiction and theory addressing issues of technology, interface, and the body. Similitudini. Simboli. Simulacri (SIMilarities, Symbols, Simulacra), a book she co-authored with Matteo Bittanti, investigates the fan culture of The Sims. Finally,reload: rethinking women and cyberculture[7] was co-authored with Austin Booth. Flanagan has also contributed to a number of academic journals, anthologies, conference proceedings writing.

Tiltfactor

When Flanagan founded Tiltfactor, it was the only game research lab in New York City. Focusing on social activism and innovative software design, Tiltfactor has developed a number of games for underserved populations. The Adventures of Josie True is a web-based game designed to teach math and science to middle school girls. The Rapunsel Project is an game currently in development to teach computer programming to children. Tiltfactor's largest project is Values At Play, an investigation of how socially-responsible values can be consciously designed into video games. Members of the lab have also published papers on video game design and digital feminist art.

External Links

• Flanagan's Artcyclopedia entry
• Flanagan's bio on the Whitney's list of commissioned artwork
• Electronic Literature Collection
• Newsweek article discussing Flanagan's work in the Whitney Biennial
• Article about the British art show Game/Play where giantJoystick premiered
• Review of Digital Media Revisited: Theoretical and Conceptual Innovation in Digital Domains and Flanagan's "analysis of computer gamers' problematic relationships to representations of women."
• Flanagan's article on gender and cyberspace in Art Journal.
• Grand Text Auto, a blog on digital narrative, games, poetry and art Flangan contributes to