Mary Flanagan

Artist website.

Mary Flanagan
Born 1969
Nationality American
Known For Sherman Fairchild Distinguished Professor in Digital Humanities, Dartmouth College and Director of the tiltfactor

Biography

Utilizing her interdisciplinary skills as an artist, author, educator, researcher, and designer, Mary Flanagan's creative practice seeks to explore the relationships between humans and the many systems through which they operate; technological, representational, linguistic, and social. Flanagan writes, "Duchamp called his own work ‘laboratory experiments’; my intention is to pursue a blend of research, process, procedure, and performance using a similar experimental framing. In this way the conceptually driven investigations form a hybrid of research, process, and performance."

Regarding accolades and education, she is the inaugural chair holder of the Sherman Fairchild Distinguished Professorship in Digital Humanities at Dartmouth College Mary, prior to which she was on the faculty at Hunter College. Flanagan graduated with a BA in Film from the University of Wisconsin, completed both MA and MFA degrees from the University of Iowa, and earned her doctorate in Computational Media from Central Saint Martins College of Art and Design, in London UK. She currently serves on the faculty of the Salzburg Global Seminar & the White House Office of Science & Technology Policy Academic Consortium on Games for Impact. Flanagan has also had extensive media success being featured in the video game art documentary 8-Bit, as well as contributing to TEDxTalks, thus solidifying herself in the fields of social culture and technology, as a broad term.

Flanagan has also achieved success in her role as author, publishing Critical Play (2009) with MIT Press, currently being in the process of publishing Values at Play in Digital Games with Helen Nissenbaumand, and the graphic novel series The Book of Jing I: Withholding Agent with Jonathan Jay Lee. She has also written over 20 critical essays and chapters on such topics as games, gender, empathy, digital representation, art and technology, and responsible design.

Flanagan has covered and diversified her critical and conceptual gaze over a multitude of different practices and systemic forms, focusing to an extent on the prose of "gaming". Thus, tiltfactor was founded by Mary Flanagan in 2003, where researchers study and develop games and related software under a critical and rigorous thesis-to-practice systemic environment. Also, Flanagan is the founder of techARTS for Girls, a non-profit program in Buffalo aimed at encouraging and developing girls’ use and knowledge of technology, through facilitating computers in exploring the arts. Notably, are the numerous grants and commissions Mary Flanagan has received, including but not limited to; The British Arts Council, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the ACLS, and the National Science Foundation.

Artwork

Mary Flanagan approaches her creative career as a means of exploring the multi faceted relationship people have with technology, and how that relationship infers and manifests meaning with regards to human experience within, but not limited to, social context. She facilitates poetry, sculpture, performance, video, extensive video game mods, video games, search engines, cellphones, code platforms, computer viruses, software, programmed text filters, network structures, information databases, and more. Flanagan, through combining her choice mediums, exposes and draws focus to the power relationships between bits and bytes, the resulting, lasting, conceptual systems, and the "truth-making" trends of online media, in tandem with human implications and manifestations. Her artwork has exhibited internationally, at venues including but not limited to; the Laboral Art Center, The Whitney Museum of American Art, SIGGRAPH, Beall Center, Postmasters, Steirischer Herbst, Ars Electronica, Artist's Space, the Telfair Museum, The Guggenheim (New York), The Incheon Digital Arts Festival, and others.

Works

• [pile of secrets] (2011)
• [borders] (2010)
• [xyz] (2009)
• [PERFECT.CITY] (2009)
• [from the ranks] (2007)
• [meme.garden] (2006)
• [theHouse] (2006)
• [giantJoystick] (2006)
• [ghost city] (2006)
• [arborescence] (2006)
• [ineffable] (2005)
• [six.circles] (2004)
• [kaleidoglobe] (2004)
• [domestic] (2003)
• [unnatural elements : avatar portraits] (2003)
• [collection] (2002)
• [double] (2002)
• [search] (2002)
• [rootwords] (2002)
• [remotion] (2002)
• [phage] (2000)
• The Water Dreaming: Matsu (1999)
• [the perpetual bed] (1998)
• she went back (1994)
• [rootings]
• CORPORATE LADDER
• Career Moves

See Also

Mary Flanagan's blog.

References

Wiki Authors

• Brock Newman and Silver Burla