Artist on the Net

Judy Malloy:
Paper presented at the Third Conference on Computers,
Freedom and Privacy, March, 1993

My work uses ideas, information, and text that like the world in which I live -- are colorful and full of life. Performed or installed in galleries, on street corners, *and on the net*, my work is made with visual text and/or small increments of information. Information, like any visual or verbal imagery is descriptive and can be used to put together a whole picture -art. Images or words -- sometimes fictional, sometimes nonfictional -- are used as molecular units to form a whole.

Shifts in how art is experienced and perceived seep slowly into our consciousness. As is evident from the 1992 issues of Leonardo Electronic News, the role of the new media audience has radically changed from that of static viewer to that of participant. The seeds of this interactive art that involves and connects the audience/reader partially lie in performance art that integrated art with life, such as Tom Marioni's "The Act of Drinking Beer with Friends is the Highest Form of Art", a series of social, beer centered events that spanned the 1970's or Bonnie Sherk's 1971 "Public Lunch", in which she sat inside The Lion House at the San Francisco Zoo and, at "feeding time", ate a meal catered by Vanessi's Restaurant.

The following 8 descriptions of 4 of my performance art works and 4 of my online works are not chronological, but the links should be apparent.

.......1 .......2 .......3 .......4 .......5 .......6 .......7 .......8

For artists who work online, the net is not just a place to discuss art, to exchange information about art - to *communicate*. These things are important, but the net is also a place to make art. The keyword is the word *communicate* because to a certain extent, art is a kind of communication. An individual or collective vision is transferred from mind to medium -on paper, on canvas, or on the network - the observer experiences that way of looking at things and that way of looking at things is *communicated*.

The net, a virtual space with communication at its core, is a place where text based art, like conceptual art information art and experimental writing can thrive outside the confining walls of galleries, museums and book covers. Art that is released in this environment (that combines the complete, formulated expression possible with written words with the immediacy and interaction of spoken words/conversations) receives immediate publication and immediate feedback. Here art is a part of a group mind and the artist can shape art not only for that group mind but with that group mind.

............................................ Judy Malloy

Judy Malloy as Super Lucy, performed at
Target Video in San Francisco and many
other places, 1982-1983

At a time when the web was not yet
established on the Internet, and artists of
all kinds - poets, performance artists,
information artists, new media artists - were
beginning to make art online, the coming together
of my work in artists books, performance and
information artist and my work as a new media
poet is described in this talk, which is edited
from a talk given at the Conference on Computers,
Freedom and Privacy in March, 1993, that was read from an array of 3x5 cards.