Artist Lecture #2 - Mary Flanagan

I watched an artist lecture given my Mary Flanagan on Youtube. Unfortunately I could not attend one of the other lectures because I have a Thursday night class.  The lecture was introduced by Mark Tribe, who I had a chance to see when he was at UNR.  Flanagan started out talking about the works that she likes and that inspire her, and that make digital media the art form that it is. 

She talked about how digital art is an everyday art.  Digital art is in the world everywhere and many things that we see every day we don’t specifically pinpoint it as digital art, or any art in general.

One project she talked about was an installation called “Giver of Names”, which was essentially a room with a computer pedestal, and you put any object on the pedestal and the computer would give the object a name.  This work was created by David Workby, and Flanagan used this work and other works she described to build up to create an understanding to the audience of what digital media actually consists of.

Flanagan used to work in the software industry, but she wanted to get out of all the high tech industry part of technology and see what regular everyday people were doing with this new technology.  One of her early works was with her grandmother, who was in the hospital.  She wanted to portray an older woman through her work because she hadn’t seen much artwork with the subject as an old, powerful woman.

She talked about one project called “Rootings” which is a series of several different arcade games.  It is shown live on her website 24 hours a day.  Basically what it is are sets of games that show personal memories of time and memories.  One of them is stories about “nightmare at night”.  You would just shoot the narrative out as you’re playing at different asteroids.  If you shoot the narratives too fast, you miss the whole story or the ‘nightmares.’  Another one of the arcade games is about a letter from her grandmother that talked about how there was nothing left that she could do but shop.  In the game you have to collect different pieces until you can piece together her grandmother’s whole letter.  This interactive project brings together elements of storytelling and game play.

She also discussed a hardware mapping project called “Virtual PC” in which the system would open up window upon window of anything the particular person has ever done on their own personal computer.  This work would bring about a personal response because it is everything that the individual has done on their computer, and it is unique to each person.  She was talking about one friend of hers that tried it out and immediately closed his computer because a nostalgic snippet of an e-mail popped up on his computer screen.

Mary Flanagan is an interactive digital artist whose work shows a personal view of herself and of the participant interacting with her projects.  Her interactive works are meant to be fun and/or interesting, and shows the audience or participant into her personal life and into their own personal life.