7. On November 8, 1988, election eve, I stood at the corner of Folsom and 9th St. in San Francisco, in front of what was then the Billboard Cafe. I wore a long white nightdress with a scarlet "V" sewed on the front. A red silk cape hung over my shoulders. In my right hand, I held a black bucket with "FREE VALUES" lettered on it in white. The bucket contained 100 "values" collected from newspapers and television over the course of the past eighteen months. The idea was to look at how value systems effected coverage and voting decisions in presidential elections. Each value was a work of art, -- mounted on a certificate, xeroxed, and cut out. Each finished value had strings attached and was numbered and hand signed.

I stood on a black painted pedestal. White texts were lettered on each side of the pedestal: such as: "If I had known the microphone was on, I would not have taken the Lord's name in vain." George Bush, CBS News 1/27/88

It was a cold November night. At Artspace, half a block to my right, there was an opening for Michael Tracy's chapel installation, Santuarios. I offered free values not only to the art crowd going back and forth between openings but also to all other people who came by that corner on that night.

Four young men in black leather jackets stole the bucket from my hand, but returned it to me when I politely asked for it back. Because the crowd was not contained, as it has been in some of my other hand out pieces, and because each handout was different, most people reacted to the piece based on the one value they received rather than by sharing and comparing values. Some were pleased. Others were outraged or confused.

A value that showed George Bush standing in front of a huge American flag with a girl scout beside him was immediately crumpled up and thrown away. A picture of the Dalai Lama with the caption: "he is accused of stirring unrest" was prized by the recipient.
A crowd with shopping bags full of groceries did not understand what I was doing but politely accepted values. Some people read the texts on the pedestal.

Some recipients traded their values. A man traded a clipping about a man who camped out in the hopes of getting a house for a picture of Donald Trump.

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Judy Malloy
Artist on the Net
Read from an array of 3X5 cards,
this talk was given in March 1993
at the Conference on
Computers, Freedom and Privacy.

Performed at the time when I was using chance to create generative hyperfiction -- part III of Uncle Roger, followed by its name was Penelope -- Free Values echoed Medieval literary games in which men and women received identity at random or the text was allotted by a roll of the dice, and the identity -- the virtue or lack of virtue -- assigned by the randomly received text was a part of the game.

Framed documentation for this work is in the collection of diRosa.