Layoff!

Angela Ferraiolo and Mary Flanagan

Artist Statements

It's amazing that Americans accept layoffs as sound business management. Mass layoffs benefit no one but a small group of corporate elites who, frankly, have been taught it's okay to behave like robber barons. I wanted to make a game that says as much. Since people have to be able to laugh at a situation before they can do anything to change it, I hope Layoff! makes life a little less scary. In that sense, I hope the game is subversive. Thanks to hyperrhiz for supporting work like this.
-- Angela Ferraiolo

Since the mid 1990s, my artwork has continued to be a site of investigation into human relationships with technology. In my work I explore the relationship between computers and everyday life from within a technologically infused culture: computer viruses, search engines, games, cell phones, and email - seemingly boring or ordinary digital systems - become for me extraordinary and revealing artifacts representing themes of human desire, intimacy, secrecy, language, and the spaces of machines themselves.
-- Mary Flanagan

::: START Layoff! :::

Biographies

Angela Ferraiolo is an interactive writer and filmmaker. She is currently working on a new interactive movie titled "The Loop". Her digital story "Map of a Future War" was published in the Fall 2008 issue of New River Journal. Her plays have been produced at La Mama Galleria and Expanded Arts in New York City and at the Brick Playhouse in Philadelphia. Angela was the narrative designer of the RPG Aidyn Chronicles and the MMORPG Earth and Beyond. She is also the web cinema reviewer for furtherfield.org.

Mary Flanagan is chair and holder of the Sherman Fairchild Distinguished Professorship in Digital Humanites at Dartmouth College, and the director of the Tiltfactor Lab, an activist game design group. Her Ph.D. was in Computational Media focusing on activist game design. Her art has been exhibited around the world and she was featured in the videogame art documentary 8 BIT. Within the field of culture and technology, she is known for her theory of playculture.