About

Mary Flanagan has a research-based practice that investigates and exploits the seams between technology, play, and human experience, exploring how data, computing practices, errors / glitches, and games reflect human psychology and the limitations of knowledge. Interested in the ways technologies can adopt or represent biases, Flanagan uncovers the underpinnings of technological systems to make them more apparent. Her approach involves both onscreen space as well as physical spaces, objects, and actions, moving away from the screen to foster reflection regarding familiar relationships to the everyday. She sees the computer as a collaborator and pursues collisions with aleatory events, chance operations and glitched code. Flanagan has exhibited internationally at venues such as The Guggenheim New York, Tate Britain, Museu de Arte, Arquitectura e Tecnologia Lisbon, the Centre de Cultura Contemporània de Barcelona, Hyundai Motorstudio Beijing, The Baltimore Museum of Art, NeMe Arts Center, Cyprus, LABoral Centro de Arte y Creación Industrial, Spain, Museum of Fine Arts Cologne, and the Whitney Biennial of American Art. Her work is featured in public and private collections, including The Whitney Museum and ZKM | Zentrum für Kunst und Medien Germany. She is the Fairchild Distinguished Professor of Digital Humanities at Dartmouth College and lives and works in Hanover NH and the city of Houston TX.

Flanagan won the Award of Distinction at Prix Ars Electronica in the Interactive art+ for her work [help me know the truth] and is the recipient of the American Council of Learned Societies Digital Innovation Fellowship, the Thoma Foundation Arts Writing Award in Digital Art, and has been awarded residencies with the Brown Foundation, MacDowell, Bogliasco, and the Robert Rauschenberg Foundation. Flanagan has lectured widely including at Oxford, Cornell, Columbia, Harvard, and the Sorbonne. She was a John Paul Getty Museum Scholar, a Senior Scholar in Residence at the Cornell Society for the Humanities, and Distinguished Visiting Scholar, Jackman Humanities Institute, University of Toronto and received an Honoris Causa in Design, Illinois Institute of Technology.

Flanagan has represented as a cultural leader at the World Economic Forum at Davos. Her work has been supported by commissions and grants including The British Arts Council, the National Science Foundation, the National Institute of Justice, the National Academy of Sciences, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the Institute of Museum and Library Services.

Mary Flanagan CV Interview in American Journal of Play

Artist Statement

My creative practice is founded on research and broadly speaking investigates human relationships with systems — technological, representational, linguistic, natural, social. Informed by research, activated by history, mediated like a spirit through various platforms and technologies, I create glimpses, speculations, reflections, promises, possibles that are often influenced by the sense of play and centuries of international thought on human values.

In writing, design and art practices, I am interested in potential situations, unexpected stories and indeterminate worlds based on core human values. I thrive on surprise, disruption and unexpected results, which is why I love games as a framework of the possible.

One focus is the anxious and profound relationship among technological systems, play, and human perception. Systems and their intersections with mundane aspects of everyday life are particularly of interest; therefore, games, computer viruses, search engines, AIs, email — seemingly ordinary things — become for me extraordinary and revealing artifacts, especially when they glitch or break.

In my studio I use methods (chance operations, OULIPO style algorithms, translation, transmutation) to defamiliarize myself with my own perceptions, to be able to see anew, and confront objects, relations, systems and their inherent world views. Computer game engines, play frameworks, and networked databases are materials by which to explore the cultural impact of systems as they permeate and mediate everyday life, while it in turn daily life is continually reshaped by the systems people make.

The process of creating the work feeds from networked culture and computational customs where flippant trends become ongoing conceptual and physical truths. I create alternate systems to negotiate a type of peace with both the fleeting and invisible nature of bits and bytes and conversely, the way these ephemeral forms forge lasting conceptual systems. Relationships of power between systems artificial and animal (nature broadly categorized) interest me greatly.

My investigations manifest using a variety of forms: web-based media, installation, poetry, computer applications, games, image-making, and performance. These forms are governed by rule sets that render possible worlds under constraint. My goal is for the work to be as experiential as it is imagistic, and that it abides by tenets of openness and testing of form. I want to craft  a challenging type of sense-making—rich forms and media that challenge absoluteness. Each work invents its own grammar and executes through associative narratives in  images and collisions. Like Duchamp, I call my work ‘laboratory experiments’: a product of research, process, procedure, and performance.

“Hope is the thing with feathers” 2022 exhibition catalog

Design Statement

My design practice is deeply informed by the 20 years of game research I’ve conducted at my research laboratory Tiltfactor.org. I design games that innovate yet are accessible to a wide audience. I focus on transformative experiences for players and narrative contexts that are inclusive, diverse, and fun. I started down this path as a digital game designer, and my practice has emerged as open to genre and situation: I create digital games, board games, sports, puzzles, urban games and other experimental games. Some of my games are commercially available; others merge into artworks, slip into books, or are deployed in research. I’m interested in how a “ludic language” emerges from games to pervade other games and everyday situations.