[Help Me Know the Truth]
MARY FLANAGAN
UCLA Art | Sci Center Gallery
CNSI Building
5th Floor
5-7pm
[help me know the truth] is a participatory artwork in which visitors become part of the work across the exhibition. Participants first snap a digital portrait at a small photo booth at the entrance to the show, and their images are used in the work. In the gallery, participants can choose between two slightly altered portraits to match the text label shown on digital devices. By selecting slight variations of the images over time, differing facial features emerge that reveal larger unconscious beliefs about facial features or tendencies related to culture and identity. The project uses a process called "reverse correlation" from computational neuroscience to capture these beliefs.
Mary Flanagan’s work plays with the anxious and profound relationship between technological systems and human experience, exploring how our data, rule systems, and context of play represent human fears and desires. Her artwork ranges from game-based installations to computer viruses, embodied interfaces to interactive texts; these works have been exhibited internationally at venues including The Whitney Museum of American Art, The Guggenheim, Tate Britain, Postmasters, Steirischer Herbst, Ars Electronica, Artist’s Space, LABoral, the Telfair Museum, ZKM Medienmuseum, Siggraph, Ars Electronica, and museums in New Zealand, South Korea and Australia.
Flanagan’s approach to games and technological systems occupy both onscreen space as well as physical spaces and actions, moving away from the screen to push reflection regarding familiar relationships to play, politics, and the personal. Flanagan teaches at Dartmouth College.