home

Flanagan is an artist, designer and writer with five scholarly books and fifty articles to her credit; her book Critical Play is standard-issue reading about games and art. She writes essays, poetry, fiction, and journalism for Salon, USA Today, Huffington Post, SF Chronicle, and Gamasutra. In 2016, Flanagan was awarded an honorary degree in Design in 2016, the Prix Ars Elecronica Award of Distinction in 2018, and the Vanguard award from Games for Change in 2016. She has been a fellow at MacDowell, Bogliasco, The Brown Foundation and a museum scholar at the Getty Museum. [read bio] Recently she spoke at the World Economic Forum at Davos, and recent keynotes include Board Game Studies Copenhagen, Games for Change NYC, and GameZ & Rulez Zurich.

I'm on the radio talking about the future of work, AI, and tech @nhpr nhpr.org/post/depth-day…

Yesterday

happenings

Happenings

Dawn Chan and I will be speaking at The Chicago Arts Institute, "On Power and Play in Virtual Worlds," Thursday, April 18, 6:00 p.m.; Gene Siskel Film Center 164 N. State St., Chicago, IL. We were awarded 2018 Arts Writing award from the Thoma Foundation; my award was for my “sustained dedication to the field as an established arts writer." What an honor! https://thomafoundation.org/news/
Hold the date for the PLAYMODE exhibition at the MAAT – Museum of Art, Architecture and Technology in Lisbon, co-curated by Filipe Pais and Patricia Gouveia in October 2019. My hopscotch inspired [bombscotch] will be playable at the show.

Human beings, thrown into games. Games, thrown into human beings. Games playing games. Humans playing humans.“Mute irrationality” was Camus’ way to approach describing the indescribable condition of human absurdity in the 20th century. I will discuss games that follow a tradition of existentialism more than that of either art or technology @apexart New York April 6th 4pm. This event is a part of Dire Jank, curated by Porpentine Charity Heartscape, at apexart until May 19, 2019.

I have a new work in a series of language based play artifacts called Wordboxes. Décomposition du Oui, Numéro 1 will show in Ménerbes France in June at the Dora Maar House. Show opens June 6th!
Resonym's new game MECHANICA finished a successful kickstarter! And, VISITOR in Blackwood Grove, published by Resonym, was only for sale at Target stores and Target.com but is now available at game stores and online too! VISITOR was a Showcase Finalist and won the Audience Choice Award at the Boston Festival of Independent Games. It was also an official selection at the IndieCade Festival of Independent Games.
"Creating a shared future in a fractured world": the theme for this year's World Economic Forum in Davos Switzerland, where Mary showcased her approach to social impact design, experiential learning, labor, and human values as one of the invited cultural leaders. In addition to "Game Changers: Playing Games for Good,"  she spoke on "The Learning Revolution: It's not about Classrooms" as well as "Human By Design" and "Putting Jobs Out of Work." Some of these events are live streamed!
Mary recently published a piece on mindfulness and the history of Solitare in Salon.com.
Mary has just been on National Public Radio twice -- in "Board Games to Fight Bias," journalist Maanvi Singh goes on a playful foray with the game Buffalo and interviews Mary about it! Singh also connects with experts in psychology to better understand how a game could shift one's biases. Listen to  Weekend Edition, National Public Radio in December of 2017;

On a 2018 episode of CODE SWITCH: Race and Identity, Remixed: You, Me, Them: Discrimination in America, she and the game Buffalo are featured in "Fighting Bias With Board Games." Super!

Buffalo: The Name Dropping Game is published by Resonym.com and available at retailers such as Amazon.
Mary joined prominent leaders from the public and private sectors, as well as international thought leaders and pioneers, at the The World Government Summit in Dubai. The Summit is the largest global platform dedicated to exploring the future of governments  and showcases future trends in government services, leadership, and innovation. She'll be contributing to the “SDGs in Action @WGS” summit, an exclusive pre-WGS event centered on the implementation of the Sustainable Development Goals and Agenda 2030. Values in Design in Action!

 

 

 
Showing in the south of France as part of national poetry month 2018, [the mirror book] installation features natural language software that merges the poems of Dora Maar with the poems of Mary Flanagan. Locals call the work "le livre magique."
My art piece [help me know the truth] was awarded an Award of Distinction at the world’s foremost digital art competition/festival in Austria and it will show in the  exhibition there in September. Read more at  https://www.aec.at/prix/en/winners/ After Ars, the work travels to be part of the show “Future Humanity—Our Shared Planet,” at the Hyundai Motorstudio in Beijing, 7 Nov 2018 – 28 Feb 2019
What mechanisms can already be implemented to affect positive change in business and society? Managing complexity in a fractured world necessitates an ethical approach to design, which Mary will discuss with  CEO/Founders of the Technology Pioneer & Forum Member communities, World Economic Forum, in March 2018 at the Center for the Fourth Industrial Revolution.
I have an article out about the rise of AI, robots, and the future of work in Salon.com. What makes a meaningful life if robots and AI do all the work? Read "The rise of the "Automacene": How robots will define the next epoch in human history" at Salon.

[help me know the truth], the arts installation based on cognitive neuroscience in which visitors to the gallery ‘judge’ each other’s manipulated images, on exhibition in Beijing November 7th, 2018 to February 28th, 2019, in coordination with Ars Electronica, Hyundai, and the Arts University CAFA in Beijing
Mary Flanagan, an artist, writer and Dartmouth professor, has published a new book of poems! Thanks for a great launch of  The Ghost Reading: Launch of GHOST SENTENCE poetry volume, with friends at the KGB Bar’s Red Room in New York City. Readers at the launch included poets Leah Umansky, Dennis Nurkse, Patricia Carlin, and computational poet Nick Montfort.
GHOST SENTENCE captures the contemporary zeitgeist of passion, power, and politics. The book was released by Atmosphere Press, a new press founded by one of the executive editors of Gold Wake Press, Nick Courtright. Read more about the book here!
Mary will be reading at Babycastles' WordHack December 21st! Founded by Todd Anderson and pretty great.
Mary's keynote "Making Play Matter" at the IGGI Intelligent Games and Game Intelligence conference explored how  values are often unwittingly embedded in games and gameplay – and how designers can embed values deliberately.  photo by @samhughes88!
As the Society for the Humanities Senior Scholar in Residence at Cornell in 2017, Mary led several graduate seminars and gave a plenary lecture as part of the year focused on notions of embodiment and identity. The Pillow Book was also part of the events with the seminar.
There's a new article by Matt Hongoltz-Hetling (@hh_matt) on Iowa farming strategies at the Weather Channel featuring some ideas from Mary Flanagan about motivating sustainable farming! Enjoy thinking about motivating sustainable behavior!! (Photo by Zach Boyden-Holmes).
Mary visited Design | Media Arts in Los Angeles in February and is exhibiting [help me know the truth] at the UCLA Art| Sci Center Gallery in 2018!

 
The artwork [bombscotch] is opening Oct 12 in a group show, Push Play, at the Vicki Myhren gallery in Denver. Also in this nifty show: Yoko Ono, Ruth Catlow, Cory Arcangel, Ryan Gander. Called 'deeply satirical,' the work critiques US violence.
books

VALUES AT PLAY IN DIGITAL GAMES

book_criticalplay

book_reskin

book_reloadcover

articles-journalism-fiction
games
work-from-the-studio