|
|
BIO: Mary Flanagan Mary Flanagan investigates everyday technologies through critical writing, artwork, and activist design projects. Flanagan's work has been exhibited internationally at museums, festivals, and galleries, including: the Guggenheim, The Whitney Museum of American Art, SIGGRAPH, The Banff Centre, The Moving Image Centre, New Zealand, Central Fine Arts Gallery NY, Artists Space NY, the University of Arizona, University of Colorado-Boulder, and venues in Brazil, France, UK, Canada, Taiwan, New Zealand, and Australia. Her projects have been funded by the National Science Foundation, the Pacific Cultural Foundation, and the National Endowment for the Arts. Flanagan writes about popular culture and digital media such as computer games, virtual agents, and online spaces in order to understand their affect on culture. Her essays on digital art, cyberculture, and gaming have appeared in periodicals such as Art Journal , Wide Angle , Intelligent Agent, Convergence, and Culture Machine, as well as several books. Her co-edited collection reload: rethinking women + cyberculture with Austin Booth was published by MIT Press in 2002. She is also co-author with Matteo Bittanti of Similitudini. Simboli. Simulacri ( SIMilarities, Symbols, Simulacra ) on The Sims game (in Italian, Unicopli 2003), and the co-editor of the collection re:skin , forthcoming from MIT Press. Flanagan is also the creator of "The Adventures of Josie True," the first web-based adventure game for girls, and is implementing innovations in pedagogical and values-based game design. 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 activist game design from Central Saint Martins College of Art and Design, UK. She teaches in the Integrated Media Arts MFA program in the Department of Film and Media Studies at Hunter College, NYC. Her research group and laboratory in New York is called TiltFactor, a lab focused on the design of activists and socially-conscious software. http://www.tiltfactor.org. http://www.maryflanagan.com. http://www.tiltfactor.org.
Since the mid 1990s, my artwork has continued to be a site of investigation into human relationships with technology, especially the gender implications inherent in technological tools and processes. In my work I explore the relationship between computers and everyday life from within a technologically infused culture: computer viruses, search engines, games, cell phones, and email — seemingly boring or ordinary digital systems — become for me extraordinary and revealing artifacts representing themes of human desire, intimacy, secrecy, language, and the spaces of machines themselves. I use technologies such as computer game engines and networked databases as materials and methods by which to explore the cultural impact of digital technology as it permeates everyday lives, while everyday lives are in turn shaped by the technologies used. The work manifests in a variety of forms, primarily as web-based media, computer applications, and games. Each work, however, involves computer programming in one form or another. In developing the work I rely a great deal on accidents occurring in the act of programming the everyday-- seeing accidents as almost an eruption of chance operations within the very code that paradoxically 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 become a blend between research, process, and performance. The process of creating the work relies on feeding off of 'internet culture' and 'computational customs', investigating how flippant trends become ongoing conceptual and physical systems. 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.
|
