Mary Flanagan
Encyclopedia
Mary Flanagan is an artist, author, educator, and designer currently residing in Hanover, New Hampshire
. She is inaugural chair holder of the Sherman Fairchild Distinguished Professorship in Digital Humanities at Dartmouth College
and the director of the Tiltfactor Lab
, an activist game design group. She graduated with a BA from the University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee, earned MFA and MA degrees from the University of Iowa
, and achieved her doctorate from Central Saint Martins College of Art and Design
, UK. She studied film for her undergraduate and masters work while her PhD was in Computational Media focusing on activist game design. Her art has been exhibited around the world and she was featured in the video game art documentary 8 BIT. Within the field of culture and technology, she is known for her theory of playculture.
Prior to coming to Dartmouth Flanagan had been on the faculty of Hunter College
.
.
video
[giantJoystick] (2006) giantJoystick is a ten-foot-tall working joystick designed for collaborative play of Atari 2600 games. Among other exhibitions, it has appeared in the 2007 Feedback show at the Laboral Art Center, Spain and at the Beall Center in Los Angeles.
video
[domestic] (2003) domestic is a modification of the first person shooter game Unreal Tournament 2003
. Combining elements of digital narrative and video game play, Flanagan uses the games engine to create a home-like environment that conveys images relating to a significant childhood memory of hers. The work is featured in the book New Media Art.
video
[collection] (2002) collection uses downloadable software to scan users' hard drives, glean random files, and store the collected information on a shared server. The combined data is then displayed, creating what has been described as a virtual networked collective unconscious. It has been featured in Sydney, Barcelona, and in the 2002 Whitney Biennial.
[phage] (2000) phage excavates the unique digital artifacts of an individual's hard drive including internet downloads, web sites visited, images and emails stored. The computer program acts as a synthetic organism, filtering through all available material and displaying the results as a floating-3D world of data.
video
Hanover, New Hampshire
Hanover is a town along the Connecticut River in Grafton County, New Hampshire, United States. The population was 11,260 at the 2010 census. CNN and Money magazine rated Hanover the sixth best place to live in America in 2011, and the second best in 2007....
. She is inaugural chair holder of the Sherman Fairchild Distinguished Professorship in Digital Humanities at Dartmouth College
Dartmouth College
Dartmouth College is a private, Ivy League university in Hanover, New Hampshire, United States. The institution comprises a liberal arts college, Dartmouth Medical School, Thayer School of Engineering, and the Tuck School of Business, as well as 19 graduate programs in the arts and sciences...
and the director of the Tiltfactor Lab
Tiltfactor Lab
The Tiltfactor Laboratory is a game research center located at Dartmouth College in Hanover, New Hampshire. Its work is centered on critical play an approach that uses games and play to investigate and explain ideas...
, an activist game design group. She graduated with a BA from the University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee, earned MFA and MA degrees from the University of Iowa
University of Iowa
The University of Iowa is a public state-supported research university located in Iowa City, Iowa, United States. It is the oldest public university in the state. The university is organized into eleven colleges granting undergraduate, graduate, and professional degrees...
, and achieved her doctorate from Central Saint Martins College of Art and Design
Central Saint Martins College of Art and Design
Central Saint Martins College of Art and Design is a constituent college of the University of the Arts London. The school has an outstanding international reputation, and is considered one of the world's leading art and design institutions...
, UK. She studied film for her undergraduate and masters work while her PhD was in Computational Media focusing on activist game design. Her art has been exhibited around the world and she was featured in the video game art documentary 8 BIT. Within the field of culture and technology, she is known for her theory of playculture.
Prior to coming to Dartmouth Flanagan had been on the faculty of Hunter College
Hunter College
Hunter College, established in 1870, is a public university and one of the constituent colleges of the City University of New York, located on Manhattan's Upper East Side. Hunter grants undergraduate, graduate, and post-graduate degrees in more than one hundred fields of study, and is recognized...
.
Artwork
Flanagan's artwork deals primarily with how the design and use of technology can reveal insights into society. Through performance, sculpture, video game mods, software, and networked databases she investigates how human relationships manifest in and are influenced by the technological artifacts permeating the modern world. Other work is concerned with cyber-feminism and the representation of women in cybercultureCyberculture
Cyberculture is the culture that has emerged, or is emerging, from the use of computer networks for communication, entertainment and business. It is also the study of various social phenomena associated with the Internet and other new forms of network communication, such as online communities,...
.
Selected Works
[xyz] (2009) Combining her interests in virtual environments and interactive writing, xyz allows participants to build poetry in 2 dimensional game worlds. Player-writers navigate three different worlds, each representing one axis and containing 1/3 of a larger text. As the players construct stanzas they are projected onto a central screen combining the three disparate texts into one new work.video
[giantJoystick] (2006) giantJoystick is a ten-foot-tall working joystick designed for collaborative play of Atari 2600 games. Among other exhibitions, it has appeared in the 2007 Feedback show at the Laboral Art Center, Spain and at the Beall Center in Los Angeles.
video
[domestic] (2003) domestic is a modification of the first person shooter game Unreal Tournament 2003
Unreal Tournament 2003
Unreal Tournament 2003 or UT2003 is a first-person shooter video game designed mainly for multiplayer gaming. The game is part of the Unreal franchise's series of games, and is a sequel to Unreal Tournament ....
. Combining elements of digital narrative and video game play, Flanagan uses the games engine to create a home-like environment that conveys images relating to a significant childhood memory of hers. The work is featured in the book New Media Art.
video
[collection] (2002) collection uses downloadable software to scan users' hard drives, glean random files, and store the collected information on a shared server. The combined data is then displayed, creating what has been described as a virtual networked collective unconscious. It has been featured in Sydney, Barcelona, and in the 2002 Whitney Biennial.
[phage] (2000) phage excavates the unique digital artifacts of an individual's hard drive including internet downloads, web sites visited, images and emails stored. The computer program acts as a synthetic organism, filtering through all available material and displaying the results as a floating-3D world of data.
video
Writing
Based on her PhD dissertation, the book Critical Play: Radical Game Design (MIT Press, 2009) examines how artists and activists throughout history have used games as instruments for social critique. With Austin Booth, Flanagan edited re:skin (MIT Press, 2007) a collection of fiction and theory exploring technology, interfaces, and the body. Similitudini. Simboli. Simulacri (SIMilarities, Symbols, Simulacra) (Edizioni Unicopli, 2003), a book she co-authored with Matteo Bittanti, investigates the fan culture of The Sims. Finally, Reload: Rethinking Women and Cyberculture (MIT Press, 2002) was also co-edited with Austin Booth and addresses gender issues in both fictional and real-life cyber-culture.] Flanagan has also contributed to a number of academic journals, anthologies, and conference proceedings.Tiltfactor
When Flanagan founded Tiltfactor at Hunter College in 2003, it was the only game research lab in New York City. Focusing on socially-conscious and innovative game design, Tiltfactor develops games for underserved populations, social intervention, and issue exploration. The lab is now based at Dartmouth College and continues to research, design, and produce socially engaging digital media.External links
- Mary Flanagan's Website
- Mary Flanagan's YouTube Channel
- Flanagan's Artcyclopedia entry
- 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 Flanagan contributes to