is an artist, game designer, and scholar from the United States. She is a Fairchild Distinguished Professor at Dartmouth College, founder of the women-led games company Resonym, and is currently artist in residence at NEMO in Amsterdam. Her work spans games, drawing, painting, and installation, that consistently create “critical play” interventions against the systems that shape our lives. She is the author of Critical Play and has exhibited at the Guggenheim, Tate Britain, and the Whitney Biennial, among others.

Jacob Karr: The question that I’m interested in is a problem, or at least many people call it a problem, of video games in the white cube, and I just wanted to ask if you see it as a problem? Have there been challenges placing virtual art in the white cube?

Mary Flanagan: I think now that is not an issue at all. But when I was first doing interactive things, there was a real divide because I ended up working on artwork in my twenties after I was a commercial game developer. I was bringing the professional experience of working on teams and having big budgets; I was a producer then director, so basically I managed, I birthed these games with my team, and I ended up going and working on that because when I was a grad student, digital editing tools were coming out. I was a very early adopter. I was doing interactive video on laser discs. It was really weird to do stuff in that generation, you know? But at that time there was a real “Art can’t have anything to do with commercial things.” And you know, in some professor’s eyes, I was like, tainted that I had worked in an industry. But I think that all that view has changed radically.

JK: I think there is a problem with video games in terms of which video games are in what kind of exhibition? Because when the MoMA has had these video game exhibitions, they’re all commercial games, specifically Minecraft with no intervention, just Minecraft as like this historical object. And that always made me think like, if that’s in one of the biggest museums, where does my work fit in relation to that?

MF: But then you have, a few years ago, there was, in one of the Whitney Biennials, Porpentine’s [Charity Heartscape], interactive fiction was also included. So I think that there are blurry lines.

JK: Do you feel that the genre of interactive art or digital interactive art still has something to prove or do you feel it’s pretty well established?

MF: Oh no, I think it’s pretty mainstream now. It’s hard to do for a number of reasons in gallery settings. One of which is the physical space of a gallery, the sales model attached to it and that kind of thing. But then the collectability of it and the long-term maintenance, that’s a whole conversation that is one side of the coin. But the other thing is like what gallery is set up to be able to run that? If you need a network and five iPads and a server in there, who’s starting it up in the morning? Who’s the steward of it? Those are only practical details, they’re not conceptual details.

I don’t think that there’s much of a resistance to digital work. I do think there’s resistance to AI work. Even a critical use of AI can get people to back up right now because of the concern. But I don’t think games have anything strange about them. Again it depends on if they’re like indie games for what audience. You know, are they art games?

JK: I have a more technical, professional, industry background like you, I originally studied computer science. I had a studio professor early in my MFA here at PCA tell me, “Jacob, you are talking like a developer right now.” That was really helpful for me, to flag that and to think about why am I doing this, what am I investigating, and what effect do I want to have on other people? I wondered if you had that same moment?

MF: No, because I’ve always known that I wanted to make things that I wanted to make. So I’m like, I have my ideas and I wanna make them. And, I was very excited to not make commercially for a while in order to do that. What I did have to do though, when I started writing critical theory, I had to rewrite the first article that I ever wrote probably five times because I had adopted the wrong language. I had gotten out of my academic language and I was in developer language and we don’t have to talk about the product. I had to rewrite it and rewrite it and rewrite it because I was writing about Lara Croft asking who are we when we’re playing? Lara Croft was a kind of conceptual question about that. And it was in 1997 or eight, so it was a while ago. And that was the only tension I felt was just my language, I realized I had been linguistically washed. I totally felt linguistically constrained as well.

Like I was making for myself, as you say, but then I would use this language of a developer to describe it, and it wasn’t so impactful when talking with other artists.

JK: I also want to ask about making it work, getting the bills paid. It’s something that me and my peers bring up all the time, maybe even more than previous generations. We’re framing it, especially as young artists, like it’s a constellation of things which help you make the rent, whether it’s fees from submissions to open calls, a teaching position, working part-time in an area of expertise. So I’m very interested in you, Mary, as a teaching artist, can you tell me a little bit about that?

MF: I think what you’re talking about is where is the place of art? And how do we survive, right? And it is important to note that very few artists pay the bills with their art. Probably Julie Mehretu can, or you know, Richard Serra. But like most artists who are working today, and I think it’s much harder right now to be an artist in general because of the cost of living around the world is so expensive, and when you were in SoHo in the 1960s, how much you needed to live was a very different kind of thing.

JK: I’m reminded of that whenever I watch retrospectives on YouTube of those New York artists from the sixties and I’m always astonished how they managed to secure apartments so cheaply.

MF: The cost of living really makes it even more challenging. Real estate especially, and it makes it really difficult to come up with various models, but for me, I’ve never really tried to make a business model of my art.

JK: Do you think that, I mean, just mapping it back to my life and experience, I really do see the advent of Gamergate as a real introduction for many young people into thinking and acting politically, and I think no matter where these young people ended up on the political spectrum, they’ve all been fundamentally shaped by it in some profound way. What can we learn from Gamergate?

MF: Oh, wow. I think Gamergate was like a test subject for the current manipulation of ideas. And bullying of people, politicians, I mean, you know, we have female leaders around the world stepping down because of the abuse. The thing Gamergate was, really, was a toe in the water, gauging how much damage a small group of people could do, internationally. I mean 4Chan and Gamergate, that duo, has really shown that a minority of voices can really disrupt the majority of things. Now it should help us think, oh, well if it can happen negatively, it should happen positively. But it just so happens that the people who are driven to do that are a different kind of people. It’s helpful ‘cause it’s like if a small number of people can do this and another small group of people changing in the other way. And I think sometimes, people feel overwhelmed and disempowered and don’t want to stoop to evil tactics. Right. Yeah. But I, on the other hand, I do think that activism has a lot to learn from how it has been squashed - how it’s been defeated.

JACOB MICHAEL KARR is an artist, game designer, and educator working with experimental video games and installation. He received an MFA in Transdisciplinary New Media from Paris College of Art.