[Purple-Blurb] Mary Flanagan Monday at 6pm

[Nick Montfort]

On Monday (November 2)
  at 6pm
   in MIT's 14E-310

The Purple Blurb series of readings and presentations on digital writing 
will present a talk by

  Mary Flanagan

author of Critical Play: Radical Game Design (MIT Press, 2009)

creator of [giantJoystick], and author of [theHouse] among other digital 
writing works. She is Sherman Fairchild Distinguished Professor in 
Digital Humanities at Dartmouth, where she directs Tiltfactor, a lab 
focused on the design of activists and socially-conscious software.

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, and The Banff 
Centre. 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 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 (2007).

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.

Using the formal language of the computer program or game to create 
systems which interrogate seemingly mundane experiences such as writing 
email, using search engines, playing video games, or saving data to the 
hard drive, Flanagan reworks these activities to blur the line between the 
social uses of technology, and what these activities tell us about the 
technology user themselves.

A representative from the MIT Press bookstore will be at the talk offering 
copies of Flanagan's books for sale.

-- 
-   Nick Montfort         nickm at nickm.com     http://nickm.com
--
-   Associate Professor of Digital Media
  -  Program in Writing & Humanistic Studies, MIT
--  77 Massachusetts Avenue, 14N-233, Cambridge, MA 02139-4307