Thursday February 28: Mary Flanagan – Opening Keynote for “Minding the Body”

Please join us this Thursday February 28, 2013 for a special presentation given by Mary Flanagan, Sherman Fairchild Distinguished Professor in Digital Humanities at Dartmouth College, Director of Tiltfactor Laboratory, and artist.

Her presentation is the opening keynote for “Minding the Body: Dualism and its Discontents,” an interdisciplinary conference hosted by the English Student Association at CUNY Graduate Center. It is also the inaugural event of our Spring 2013 speaker series, kindly sponsored by the GC Digital Initiatives Program (full schedule coming soon).

Mary Flanagan (Dartmouth College)

“Never Mind the Body, Here’s a Gamepad? Considering Embodiment in The Age of Play“

Sponsored by the English Student Association, Doctoral Students’ Council, GC Digital Initiatives, the Center for Humanities, and CUNY Digital Humanities Initiative

Thursday, February 28, 2013, 4:00 p.m. – 5:30 p.m.

C204-C205, CUNY Graduate Center

This keynote presentation explores a pervasive onscreen/offscreen split of identification and the body in what we could now call The Age of Play. Citing examples from artists’ work and popular culture, with a focus on games, Flanagan leads the audience on an investigation of current trends that are in diametrical opposition: on the one hand, a hunger for embodied, resonant experience; and on the other, a desire for control for the body, a recurring motif in fields from psychology to public health, manifesting in plastic surgery and digital manipulation of the body.

The presentation is free and open to the public and will also be available as a live streaming video (link will be available shortly before the presentation on Thursday, Feb. 28).

Flanagan Keynote Poster

About “Minding the Body”:

“Minding the Body: Dualism and its Discontents” is an interdisciplinary conference hosted by the English Student Association at The CUNY Graduate Center. The conference presents work by 65 presenters that explore the “mind-body problem” via a range of disciplines, including literary studies, philosophy, medicine, psychology, sociology, film and media studies, the visual arts, performance studies, and cognitive science, among others. See the conference website for more details.

About Mary Flanagan:

Mary Flanagan is an innovator focused on how people create and use technology. Her groundbreaking explorations across the arts, humanities, and sciences represent a novel use of methods and tools that bind research with introspective cultural production. As an artist, her  collection of works range from game-inspired systems to computer viruses, embodied interfaces to interactive texts. These works are exhibited internationally at venues including the Laboral Art Center, The Whitney Museum of American Art, SIGGRAPH, Beall Center, The Banff Centre, The Moving Image Center, Steirischer Herbst, Ars Electronica, Artist’s Space, The Guggenheim Museum New York, Incheon Digital Arts Festival South Korea, Writing Machine Collective Hong Kong, Maryland Institute College of Art, and venues in Brazil, France, UK, Canada, Taiwan, New Zealand, and Australia.

As a researcher, she focuses on popular culture, digital studies, and computer games to look at issues of representation, behavior, equity, and process. She writes about popular culture and digital media such as computer games, virtual agents, and online spaces in order to understand how they affect and reflect culture. In the field of creative writing, Flanagan is known as a writer of electronic literature, and she is also a poet, with work in The Iowa Review, Barrow Street, Saranac Review, Mudfish, and other books & periodicals. She has written more than twenty critical essays on digital art, cyberculture, and gaming in periodicals such as Art Journal, Wide Angle, Intelligent Agent, Convergence, and Culture Machine, as well as several books. Her books in English include reload: rethinking women + cyberculture (2002), re:SKIN (2007), and Critical Play: Radical Game Design (2009), all with MIT Press. She is also co-author with Matteo Bittanti of Similitudini. Simboli. Simulacri, on the game The Sims (in Italian, Unicopli 2003). She is author, with Helen Nissenbaum, of the forthcoming Values at Play (MIT Press, 2013).

Flanagan founded the Tiltfactor game research laboratory in 2003, where researchers study and make social games, urban games, and software in a rigorous theory/practice environment. She is the Sherman Fairchild Distinguished Professor in Digital Humanities at Dartmouth College.

Website: http://www.maryflanagan.com/(includes extensive images and video). Mary Flanagan also writes on Grand Text Auto. See also Values at Play.

Tags | cunydhi, dh, flanagan, games

Spring 2013 CUNY Digital Studies/Digital Humanities Seminar Schedule

We are delighted to announce the schedule for our Spring 2013 speaker series, kindly sponsored by the GC Digital Initiatives Program.

All events are free and open to the public, and take place at the CUNY Graduate Center.

 

Thursday February 28: Mary Flanagan (Dartmouth College)
“Never Mind the Body, Here’s a Gamepad? Considering Embodiment in The Age of Play”
Sponsored by the English Student Association, Doctoral Students’ Council, GC Digital Initiatives, and CUNY Digital Humanities Initiative
Time & Place: 4:00pm-5:30pm, Room C204-205, CUNY Graduate Center

Opening keynote for “Minding the Body: Dualism and its Discontents,” an interdisciplinary conference hosted by the English Student Association at CUNY Graduate Center.

This keynote presentation explores a pervasive onscreen/offscreen split of identification and the body in what we could now call The Age of Play. Citing examples from artists’ work and popular culture, with a focus on games, Flanagan leads the audience on an investigation of current trends that are in diametrical opposition: on the one hand, a hunger for embodied, resonant experience; and on the other, a desire for control for the body, a recurring motif in fields from psychology to public health, manifesting in plastic surgery and digital manipulation of the body.

Mary Flanagan is Sherman Fairchild Distinguished Professor in Digital Humanities at Dartmouth College and Director of Tiltfactor Laboratory. She writes at Grand Text Auto; see also her work on Values at Play.

 

Wednesday March 20: Anne Balsamo (The New School)
“The Cultural Work of Interactive Memorials: Lessons from the AIDS Memorial Quilt Digital Experience Project”
Time & Place: 6:30pm-8:30pm, CUNY Graduate Center, Room 3212

Anne Balsamo is Dean of the School of Media Studies and Professor of Media Studies at The New School for Public Engagement. She is a national leader in media studies, scholar and media-maker whose work links cultural studies, digital humanities, and interactive media. See more about her work at her site, Designing Culture.

 

Thursday April 4: Kari Kraus (University of Maryland)
“Experiments in Design Fiction”
Time & Place: 6:30pm-8:30pm, CUNY Graduate Center, Room 6421

Kari Kraus is an assistant professor in the College of Information Studies and the Department of English at the University of Maryland. Her research and teaching interests focus on new media and the digital humanities, textual scholarship and print culture, digital preservation, transmedia storytelling, and game studies.

 

Wednesday April 10: Rita Raley (University of California, Santa Barbara)
“Towards a Critical Digital Humanities”
Time & Place: 6:30pm-8:30pm, CUNY Graduate Center, Room 6417
This event has been cancelled due to a scheduling conflict.

 

Wednesday April 17: Arienne Dwyer (University of Kansas)
“Using Languages as Historical Sources”
Time & Place: 6:30pm-8:30pm, CUNY Graduate Center, Room 3212

Arienne M. Dwyer is a Professor of Linguistic Anthropology, affiliated with Linguistics and Indigenous Nations Studies, and Co-Director of the Institute for Digital Research in the Humanities at the University of Kansas. Her work focuses on language change; she has conducted 20 years of local research with individuals and communities in Inner and Central Asia and has directed a number of collaborative documentation and archiving projects.

 

Thursday May 2: Beth Harris (Khan Academy)
“Art History Education Goes Digital: The Problem (& Promise) of the Digital Image”
Time & Place: 6:30pm-8:30pm, CUNY Graduate Center, Room 6421

Beth Harris is dean of Art and History at the Khan Academy. She and Dr. Steven Zucker are Executive Editors of Smarthistory at Khan Academy, an open educational resource for art history that they co-founded (as smarthistory.org) in 2005. Before joining the Khan Academy, she was Director of Digital Learning at The Museum of Modern Art, where she started MoMA Courses Online.