Judy Malloy

"Malloy uses the fluidity of the hypertextual medium to create a poetic text, which, in spite of its fragmentation and discontinuity, leads to a reading experience that is very satisfying because it allows the reader greater creativity as to the form the reading will take. ...In Malloy's text, the visual is transformed into the verbal. The border between text and image dissolves, and image becomes the text." Jaishree K. Odin, Modern Fiction Studies (MFS)

sailboat drawing "[Malloy is] one of the most fascinating hypertext stylists ... The experiment with randomization is bold and surprisingly effective. As a result, Penelope can be read through multiple times ... each reading creating overlapping, but never matching, impressions." -- Alvin Lu, , The Bay Guardian
its name was Penelope, Eastgate Systems, Cambridge, MA, 1993

1990 Narrabase Press version
(this web verion emulates the version that I created in BASIC in 1989)

"Penelope's compounded, disjunctive structure corresponds with and seems to aris e from the narrator's restless splitting off of attention, under the opposed attractions of sexual and esthetic desire .....The analogy between the on-screen texts of Penelope and sequences of photographs prompts the reader's reflection up on the nature of each medium...the words of a text screen float on a motile surface, poised for instantaneous change into another, not fully predictable writing." - Barbara Page, Postmodern Culture

its name was Penelope was first exhibited in 1989 in the landmark exhibition Revealing Conversations at the Richmond Art Center, curated by Zlata Baum and featuring the work of artists including Lynn Hershman and Sonya Rapoport. Additionally, among many other venues, its name was Penelope was exhibited at The Space in Boston in 1993 (curated by George Fifield); in Electronic Literature and Its Emerging Forms at the Library of Congress in 2013 (curated by Dene Grigar and Kathi Inman Berens); and at the University of California, Berkeley Doe Library in 2016 and California College of the Arts in 2017. (curated by Elika Ortega and Alex Saum-Pascual). A 1994 reading video is in The American Poetry Archives (currently being digitized) and a paper: Judy Malloy, "Constructing Generative Hypertext: its Name was Penelope,” is in Maria Mencia, ed., #WomenTechLit, West Virginia University Press, 2017.

NEW: Judy Malloy: Negotiating The Shifting Electronic Literature Environment, presented at the Book launch for Dene Grigar and Mariusz Pisarski: "The Challenge of Born-Digital Fiction, Cambridge University Press, March 22, 2024 with speakers Michael Joyce, Judy Malloy, and Stuart Moulthrop.



Writer's Notebook, June 2020-

Judy Malloy on Facebook

Instagram archive



passport photo l0ve0ne, 1994

"Form and content achieve a near-perfect suture in the first selection in the Eastgate Web Workshop: Judy Malloy's lOve One..." - Rita Raley, Postmodern Culture (PMC)

l0ve0ne (1994) was the first work in the Eastgate Web Workshop. In this seminal web-based hypernovella -- of Xreality, changing identities, physical computing, robotic Pinocchios, Rajput miniatures that morph into parallel narratives, barns full of old computers, and country western songs on German radio -- an American writer on Holiday in Germany and France is immersed in an underground world of European hacker-artist culture. With the enchanting name of k0cHack0g0s, l0ve0ne has also been translated into Polish by Mariusz Pisarski and Zuzanna Grochulska.

Coming soon: July 18-21, 2024. Talk at ELO24: "l0ve0ne: Creating Electronic Literature on the Early World Wide Web"



the Artswire Menu Judy Malloy Papers, Rare Book, Manuscript,
and Special Collections Library, Duke University


Memories of Arts Wire
Memories of Art Com and La Mamelle
Remembering Judith Hoffberg

Reviews

Artists Books, Installations, Performances






The Roar of Destiny

"...Malloy's most technically and visually sophisticated work for the web to date, while carrrying on her hallmark tradition of intense, compact writing" - Richard Kostelanetz, A Dictionary of the Avant-Gardes, Routledge

- Paul Hertz, Leonardo Electronic Almanac "Judy Malloy explores the intricacies of gender and interpersonal relations, using a collage technique to elude facile analyses or constructions of narrative line. Computers drift in and out of the "Roar of Destiny" as structural cues, as elements within it, and as psychic affects that hack consciousness in the form of hallucinatory dreams."

Described by interactivecinema.org as "...a perfect example of thought and physical interaction working together... ", The Roar of Destiny is an electronic manuscript constructed with hundreds of intertwined lexias. A dense interface of links that lead to fragmented story-bearing lexias, creates an experience of environment and altered environment , and the reader, like the narrator, is involved in a continual struggle between the real and the virtual.

Judy Malloy's classic webwork The Roar of Destiny was included in the Boston CyberArts HyperGallery; exhibited at ISEA97; and documented in Interactive Dramaturgies (Heide Hagebolling, ed, Berlin, Heidelberg, Springer, 2004); in A dictionary of the avant-gardes; (Routledge, 2001) and in the 2000 Fraunhofer Net Art Guide. It was also featured on the cover of Leonardo. In 2012 it was included in Pulp to Pixels: Artists Books in the Digital Age at the Hampshire College Gallery, Amherst, MA. The 2016 20th Aniversary Edition was included in John Barber's radioELO; exhibited at the 2016 Electronic Literature Organization Conference; and included in Dene Grigar's exhibition at Beyond GRAMMATRON: 20 Years into the Future British Computer Society, Covent Garden, London, September, 2017.



Judy Malloy, editor

Women, Art & Technology

Cambridge, MA, MIT Press, 2003

"...A rich source of information about the women and works that have made media arts history -- or should. Not only is it a must-read but it is also a must-have..." - Dene Grigar, American Book Review

"Judy Malloy's anthology Women, Art and Technology is a rare and welcome book. It is a collection of insiders' histories of a world that was only briefly glimpsed and that for the most part remained unrecorded...the arrival of this exploration of the continuity of artistic vision and political concerns that have driven women's aesthetic experimentation with technology over the last few decades is a real gift..." Carolyn Guertin, TrAce



"Interactive art involves exchange between its originator, work, and participants. It often emphasizes communication, process, and the building of perceptual systems.

Interactive art is usually (but not necessarily) computer mediated. It may respond to audience input. Or, it may be continually created by its audience, thus blurring the line between artist and user. Interactive art can also be a static work that was collaboratively created -- the result of an interactive process. There are other possibilities." -- Anna Couey and Judy Malloy

image of a lab flask

The Interactive Art Conference

was founded by Anna Couey & Judy Malloy on Arts Wire in 1993 and was an active forum for discussion and interviews until 1998.



Judy Malloy and Cathy Marshall, Forward Anywhere

Eastgate Systems, 1996.

".... a subtly worked epistolary text whose own concerns seem to take precedence over those of the two individuals. Read forward or randomly, it both coheres and surprises." -- Marek Kohn, The London Independent



"...Partly the difference stems from craft mastery: Judy Malloy and Cathy Marshall know things about hypertext that can only come from very strong engagement. Above all, of course, Forward Anywhere is distinguished by the quality of its language... - Stuart Moulthrop, Convergence

"Judy Malloy and Cathy Marshall know things about hypertext that can only come from very strong engagement. Above all, of course, Forward Anywhere is distinguished by the quality of its language..... Both reflect on the self-conceived demons and intimate terrors of awakened imagination. Both might have something to say, if we are inclined to read that way, about female identity in world of mechanism and brutality." -- Stuart Moulthrop, Convergence: The Journal of Research into new media technologies

Cathy: Long term collaborations are based not only on subject matter or the work to be done, but also on the relationships that form among the collaborators. These relationships emerge over time, through conversations, through stories and anecdotes, through imperfectly remembered and half-imagined bits of the past. The fabrics of communities are woven from their members' mutually constructed pasts, until the past becomes shared.

Forward Anywhere was produced under the auspices of Xerox PARC in Palo Alto, beginning in 1993. It was exhibited at PARC as part of the 25th Anniversary Celebration and at Artemisia Gallery in Chicago. Readings from this work were at The University of California at Davis and, as part of Wired Women, at Black Oak Books in Berkeley. Papers: Judy Malloy and Cathy Marshall, "Notes on an Exchange Between Intersecting Lives", in Craig Harris, ed, In Search of Innovation - the Xerox PARC PAIR Experiment, Cambridge, MA, MIT Press, 2000; Judy Malloy and Cathy Marshall, " Closure was Never a Goal in this Piece," in Lynn Cherny and Elizabeth Reba Weise, eds, Wired Women: Gender and New Realities in Cyberspace , Seattle, WA, Seal Press, 1996 pp. 56-70

Coming soon: September 21, 2024 to February 2, 2025 -- at the California Museum of Photography and the Culver Center of the Arts, UC Riverside -- the Eastgate version of "Forward Anywhere" by Judy Malloy and Cathy Marshall in the exhibition "Digital Capture". a part of the Getty Series: @PST_ART : Art & Science Collide.

Spring Day Notation, (2010) a song of
wildflowers on the trail, painting, and musical notation



"...In the eight months which we spent there, I filled one sketchbook with minutely detailed drawings...."
Judy working on an artists book, Northern California, circa 1976
Dorothy Abrona McCrae
an electronic manuscript
Narrabase Press, 2000
Included in the Hammer Museum Electronic Readings, Los Angeles, CA, 2002

Narrated by a "Bay Area Figurative" painter, Dorothy Abrona McCrae is a lexia-based electronic manuscript in which the details of the narrator's life are intertwined with a past that is disclosed through descriptions of her work. The story is set in her studio/residence in the California Gold Country foothills. It was the first narrative in a series of works about the lives of Dorothy Abrona McCrae and San Francisco Gallery owner Sid Seibelman. This is a favorite work with readers, and every month it garners a substantial number of views.




Bad Information "...To gather the information for the projects discussed in this paper, I formed my own research and development companies. Not only was it easier to acquire vendor information as President of OK Research, OK Genetic Engineering, and Bad Information, but also, by becoming a part of the subject myself, I was able to look at and describe it as an insider. In the way court painters became a part of the court, I have tried to become a part of the technical community."

Bad Information, Monumental Women, SOMAR Gallery Space, San Francisco, Sept. 18 - Oct 31, 1987 (installation)

BAD Information on ACEN on The WELL

New: At the Center for Advanced Study, National Gallery of Art, March 28, 2024 - Erin Dickey: “'Computers Never Make Mistakes': Judy Malloy’s Bad Information”


A pioneer on the Internet and in electronic literature, Judy Malloy followed a vision of hypertextual narrative that she began in the 1970's with experimental artist books created in card catalog and electro-mechanical structures, and in 1986 she wrote and programmed the pioneering hyperfiction Uncle Roger, which was documented in the NEH-funded Pathfinders: Documenting the Experience of Early Digital Literature and in Literary and Linguistic Computing. In the ensuing years she created a series of hypernarratives published by Eastgate, includingits name was Penelope, which was called one of the early classics of electronic literature by Robert Coover. Beginning in 1993, she was invited to Xerox PARC where she worked in Computer Science Laboratory as an artist-in-residence, and consultant in virtual communities and the document of the future.

At Princeton University in 2013 and 2014, as a Distinguished Fellow she taught a seminar in Social Media: History, Poetics and Practice and as a Visiting Lecturer, she team-taught Electronic Literature: Lineage, Theory and Contemporary Practice. She has also taught at the San Francisco Art Institute and the Rutgers Camden Digital Studies Center and is currently a lecturer in the School of the Art Institute of Chicago Art and Technology Studies Department.

Her work has been exhibited and published internationally including, among many others, the Library of Congress; Tisch School of the Arts; Sao Paulo Biennial; Ars Electronica; FILE;ISA; the National Library of Madrid; Los Angeles Institute for Contemporary Art; Walker Art Center; Hammer Museum; Universite Paris I-Pantheon-Sorbonne; the Center of Contemporary Art in Barcelona; Eastgate Systems; E. P. Dutton; Tanam Press; Seal Press; Convergence; Johns Hopkins Press; and the Biennale Internationale des poetes en Val de Marne, where her work was short listed for the Prix poesie-media. Her recent electronic manuscript, Arriving Simultaneously, premiered at ELO2018, Université du Québec à Montréal in August 2018, was Shortlisted for the 2018 Robert Coover prize for the year's best work of electronic literature, accepted for exhibition in FILE SAO PAULO 2020: The Electronic Language International Festival, and in June 2020, the inaugural issue of The Digital Review published "Arriving Simultaneously: Selections from a Writer's Notebook"

As an arts writer, she has been Editor of Arts Wire Current/NYFA Current and content coordinator/network coordintor of Arts Wire, a social media initiative that brought artists and arts organizations online under the auspices of the New York Foundation for the Arts. She is the editor of the 2016 MIT Press book, Social Media Archeology and Poetics and of the MIT Press compendium, Women, Art & Technology, as well as Founding Editor of Content | Code | Process. Her chapter on "Authoring Systems" was published in the Johns Hopkins Guide to Digital Media in 2014, and her chapter "'A WAY IS OPEN', Allusion, Identity, Authoring System, and Audience in Early Text-Based Electronic Literature" was included in Electronic Literature as Digital Humanities., Bloomsbury, 2021. Her papers are archived as The Judy Malloy Papers at the David M. Rubenstein Rare Book & Manuscript Library at Duke University.





Deep background:

My work began with a dual career as artist/writer and technical information specialist working at jobs that included Union Catalog searcher/editor for the Library of Congress, Technical Librarian for Ball Aerospace in Boulder, Colorado, where in 1969 I designed and worked as a programmer for an innovative computer catalog of the library's holdings; Technical Librarian for a company that researched the D layer of the ionosphere; cataloging for J. Walter Thompson (circa 1967 on a contract for the Goddard Space Flight Center Library's computer catalog) and in phytopathology at the University of California at Berkeley, where I catalogued books and documents.

Judy Malloy, card catalogs, 1976- Initially, there was no relationship between these jobs and the work that I created in my studio, but gradually, the idea of using information and information system structures -- for informing and shaping narrative -- seeped into my work. Beginning in the 1970's, sequentially read folders of drawings, narrative maps, and narrative card catalogs, such as The Woodpile, (1979) and and Hearst Strip, (1980) began an exploration of nonsequential literature.

The photo was taken by Bruce Handelsman for a 1980 exhibition at the Berkeley Art Center and also used in Judy Malloy, "Stories, Information as an Artists Material", Whole Earth Review, Winter, 1987, pp. 48-49; and in the seminal paper on Uncle Roger: Judy Malloy, "Uncle Roger, an Online Narrabase", in Roy Ascott and Carl Eugene Loeffler, Guest Editors, Connectivity: Art and Interactive Telecommunications,Leonardo 24:2, 1991, pp.195-202.



"...Malloy's development as an experimental artist aligned with the rise of the computer age. From the envelope-pushing days of The WELL to the mainstream of the Web browser, Malloy remained at the forefront of innovation..." - Dene Grigar, Traversals. MIT Press...





[ Landscape Projects] [ Artists Books]







For a short list of selected
works of my electronic literature,
click HERE

photo of Judy Malloy - March, 2024 Lecturer, School of the Art Institute of Chicago, 2018- ; Digital Studies Fellow, DSC, Rutgers University Camden, 2016-2017; Visiting Lecturer: Princeton University, Electronic Literature: Lineage, Theory, and Contemporary Practice, Fall 2014; Visiting Lecturer/Distinguished Fellow: Princeton University, Social Media: History, Poetics, and Practice, Fall 2013. Social Media Archeology and Poetics, MIT Press, 2016
2023 CV

icon In 2024:
___September 21, 2024 to February 2, 2025 -- at the California Museum of Photography and the Culver Center of the Arts, UC Riverside -- the Eastgate version of "Forward Anywhere" by Judy Malloy and Cathy Marshall in the exhibition "Digital Capture". a part of the Getty Series: @PST_ART : Art & Science Collide.
___July 18-21, 2024, talk at ELO24: Judy Malloy, "l0ve0ne: Creating Electronic Literature on the Early World Wide Web"
___At the Center for Advanced Study, National Gallery of Art, March 28_, Erin Dickey: “'Computers Never Make Mistakes': Judy Malloy’s Bad Information”
___Book launch for Dene Grigar and Mariusz Pisarski: "The Challenge of Born-Digital Fiction", Cambridge University Press, March 22, 2024, with speakers Michael Joyce, Judy Malloy, and Stuart Moulthrop

fpfp icon 2024 Exploring authoring systems that eventually produce print literature Forward Progress on the Fields of Play Football, Fluxus art, and a medieval Book of Hours. Yes!

Popular Paper: Judy Malloy, "'A WAY IS OPEN', Allusion, Identity, Authoring System, and Audience in Early Text-Based Electronic Literature" in Electronic Literature as Digital Humanities. Dene Grigar and James O'Sullivan, eds. Bloomsbury Press, 2021.

2023:
__September 21-30, 2023, the sound version of The Fabric of Everyday Life was shown at The MIT Trope Tank. Curators: Clara Fernandez-Vara and Nick Montfort.
__"Data and Process in Information-centered Creative Practice", presented at the 2023 Electronic Literature Organzation Conference, Coimbra, Portugal, July 12-15, 2023;
__My early work in information art was the subject of Megan Hines' paper "The Archive as Feminist Critique: Judy Malloy’s OK Genetic Engineering" presented at the College Art Association Conference in NYC in February 2023;
__Uncle Roger included in an exhibition at the Hertziana Bibliotheca, in Rome, September, 2023, in conjunction with the ACM Hypertext Conference. Curator: Dene Grigar;

2022:: "Narrative in the Contemporary Social Media Environment," paper presented at the Electronic Literature Organization Conference, Como Italy, May 30, 2022. Papers will be published in the proceedings. Background Documentation

2020:
__"Eintritt in ein Lebewesen", Kunstraum Kreuzberg Berlin, May 18 - August 20, 2020 (curated by Tilman Baumgärtel) explored the legacy of social sculpture in contrast with the rise of social media suveillance capitalism. Work by Joseph Beuys, Nam June Paik, Cory Arcangel, Judy Malloy, Natalie Bookchin, Constant Dullaart, Miranda July, Olia Lialina, Mark Flood and more...
__Judy Malloy, "Arriving Simultaneously: Selections from a Writer's Notebook", The Digital Review, Spring 2020.


featured work: Icons from Arriving, such as punch cards
Arriving Simultaneously on Multiple Far-Flung Systems, a virtual reading machine:

"I placed the stack of punch cards on the belt and watched with horror as the card reader spat the entire stack into the air. They flew about the room as if propelled by an unsensed breeze and landed like autumn leaves scattered out of order on the floor."

Premiered at ELO2018, Université du Québec à Montréal in August 2018. Shortlisted for the 2018 Robert Coover prize for the year's best work of electronic literature. Accepted for exhibition in FILE SAO PAULO 2020: The Electronic Language International Festival.


Generative Poetry:

2020, 2023: "The Fabric of Everyday Life", a work of aleatoric poetry, which explores both the creative possibilities and the "big brother: overtones of ubicomp technologies, was exhibited at ELO2020, online in July 2020.

2021: "merged with the screen for days" -- an aleatoric environment composed with the details of life during the COVID pandemic -- is included in digital art from the pandemic, an Electronic Literature Organization 2021 Conference exhibition, May, 2021.



an image of a yellow bowl

a yellow bowl with arrows entering and emerging The Yellow Bowl
Premiere: ACM Hypertext 2019, September,17-20, Institute of Information Systems, University of Hof, Germany. Soundwork: Night of Performance, ELO2019, Cork, Ireland, July 17, 2019.



Issues in Social Media for the Arts,SAIC ATS Social Media Narratives: "Blueskying a Social Media Platform for the Arts", November, 7-12, 2019.


Social Media Archeology and Poetics, MIT Press, 2016.
Shortlisted for the 2017 Hayles Prize.

"Judy Malloy fashions a rich, historic tapestry on the loom of the Internet and contemporary technologies of the twentieth century. We rediscover our human, social roots in this primary source rendering of the interplay of social media and technology."
- Vint Cerf, Chief Internet Evangelist, Google

"In this dense and fascinating book, Judy Malloy has assembled a multifaceted collage of essays and articles that examine the evolution of cyberspace, with a focus on the surprising role that artists and writers played, and the ways that their work and experiments provided a foundation and shape for the social media universe we know today." - Grantmakers in the Arts: GIA Reader


imaes of Dorothy Richardson and Virginia Woolf


2017: "the whole room like a picture in a dream":
Dorothy Richardson and Virginia Woolf Writing



recent conferences, book chapters, exhibitions. and honors

___"Conveying Diaspora in a Polyphonic Electronic Manuscript", Special issue on "Other Codes", Hyperrhiz_ New Media Cultures, Spring, 2019
___"From Ireland with Letters: Issues in Public Electronic Literature", Convergence, The International Journal of Research into New Media Technologies, 24:3, 2018
___"Recollected on this Early Morning", video talk and introduction, Transient Topographies, Second Galway Digital Cultures Initiative Conference, Moore Institute, NUI Galway, April 20-21, 2018.
___Foreword, New Media Futures The Rise of Women in the Digital Arts, edited by Donna Cox et al., University of Illinois Press, 2018. Work also included in Herstory,2022 web addition to the book. ___Topcoder's 2018 10 Women in Tech to Celebrate This International Women’s Day
___ COLOSSUS and LUMINARY: The Apollo 11 Guidance Computer (AGC) Code, CSS Working Group 2018, January 15 - February 6, 2018.



"For over two decades, Malloy has been spinning together history, fiction, technology, memoir, geography, arts, and love into narrative poems that capture the zeitgeist of the early Internet era. With another portion in the making, the time may have arrived for a hypertext epic. - Leonardo Flores

decorative prologue graphic As if the memory was a song: From Ireland with Letters, an electronic manuscript, written in generative hypertext and polyphonic text and based partly on the cadence of ancient Irish poetry, was completed in 2017. In May, 2017, the complete work premiered at Other Codes / Cóid Eile: Digital Literatures in Context at the National University of Ireland, Galway.

The work has also been exhibited at the Bibliothèque Nationale de France, Paris; FILE 2012 - Electronic Language International Festival, Sao Paulo, Brazil, and my paper, "From Ireland with Letters: Issues in Public Electronic Literature,“ was published online in Convergence, The International Journal of Research into New Media Technologies.



"...In Paths of Memory and Painting, the viewer is asked to navigate the poem by clicking the lexia that attracts them. An ethereal narrative emerges based on individual decision. The resulting form reflects the viewer’s desire for a certain path. The act of reading poetry and choosing what portion comes next alters the traditional form and a feeling of intimacy emerges between the viewer and the computer... -- Mary Gagler, Curator, Technology Becomes Them

decorative text
Paths of Memory and Painting (2010) was presented at the UC Berkeley Center for New Media Roundtable, 2010, and exhibited at the Electronic Literature Organization Conference, Brown University, 2010

...multiple paths through narrative ...a reading experience of successive text-paintings that chronicle the changes in a painter's work...from World War II to art school in Northern California to the influence of California painters -- from environmental artist William Keith, African American painter Grafton Tyler Brown, deaf artist Granville Redmond, Mary DeNeale Morgan, who studied at the San Francisco Art Institute, and imprisoned Japanese American artist Chiura Obata to The Bay area Figurative school and the work of David Park, Elmer Bischoff, Nathan Oliveira, Joan Brown and Manuel Neri. Part I: where every luminous landscape (2008) was short listed for the 2009 Prix poesie-media, France; featured at: The Future of Writing, UC Irvine, 2008; on Cover to Cover on KPFA radio in Berkeley in 2008; and at E-Poetry Festival, Barcelona, 2009.



decorative silverbeach icons A Party at Silver Beach (2003; 2012)

"As in the aftermath of a weekend houseparty near the beach -- where family, friends, and strangers appear, disappear and reappear in the summer afternoon sun, while the sound of the ocean rolling in and out intermingles with music and the sweet echo of wine glasses clinking together -- Dorothy and Sid's party is occurring and reoccuring in my mind. Overlapping conversations repeat as in an old round. In the warm sun, the taste of champagne triggers memories and dreams."

Uncle Roger wound up the music box, and it began to play an unfamiliar aria. "In Sid's gallery," he said, "there is a video of randomly recurring footage of a woman sitting on a bench outside of a cabin with mountains in the distance. Sometimes she is writing in a notebook, sometimes looking directly at the camera. Sometimes she is looking away from the camera toward the mountains."



Uncle Roger
35th Anniversary: 1986-2021

Uncle Roger floppy disk and sleeve
"...looping in my mind,nested with brief dreams and nightmares..."


In the spring of 1986, I was invited by my friend, video and performance art curator Carl Loeffler, to go online and write on the seminal Art Com Electronic Network (ACEN) on The WELL where ACEN Datanet, an early online publication, would soon feature actual works of art, including works by John Cage, Jim Rosenberg, and my own Uncle Roger. Once in a while in a lifetime, everything comes together. In 1986, it was my experience in database programming, the idea I had been working on since 1976 of using molecular narrative units to create nonsequential narrative, the availability of personal computers that would make what I had been trying to do with "card catalog" artists books more feasible, and the arrival of ACEN, a place to create, publish and discuss the work.

Uncle Roger was released on ACEN in 1986 as a social media-based narrative intervention and published online as an interactive hypertext on ACEN Datanet in 1987. In 1987, I packaged my 1986 Apple II BASIC disk version of File 1. This version was sold via the Art Com catalog and traveled internationally in a series of exhibitions. In 1987, Uncle Roger was included in Ultimatum II, Images du Futur '87. (Montreal) In 1988 it was exhibited at Tisch School of the Arts, New York University. And from 1988-1989, it was exhibited at San Jose State University, the University of Colorado, Ars Electronica, (Linz, Austria) Carnegie Melon University, and A Space. (Toronto)

In 1989, Uncle Roger was honored with inclusion in the Centennial issue of The Wall Street Journal, and 30 years since Uncle Roger was released, a World Wide Web version is still available. and the 1986-1988 BASIC version of Uncle Roger is available for download.

In September, 2013, Uncle Roger (Art Com Electronic Network, 1986-1988) was documented in a two day series of interviews and readings produced by Pathfinders, a National Endowment for the Humanities funded ELO project to discover the reading experience of early digital literature. The project -- led by Dene Grigar (Washington State University Vancouver) and Stuart Moulthrop. (University of Wisconsin Milwaukee) -- also documented the work of John McDaid, Shelley Jackson, and Bill Bly. Pathfinders resulted in a scalar publication and a book, Traversals (MIT Press, 2017), edited by Moulthrop and Grigar.



"One of the promising things about the better hypertext poems like Judy Malloy's 'Its Name Was Penelope' is that it generates random pages that add up to fascinating patterns or allows readers to create their own narrative and connections as they go along. Every time you read it, it's a different story. The reader decides when the text is over. That's what a successful work of hypertext-based literature can do that paper-based writing can't: share power." - Jimmy Guterman, Chicago Tribune



"...there is the exploration of evolving human relationships as in a Carolyn Guyer hypernarrative, the sheer pleasure of play as in John McDaid's many-roomed fun house, the revelation of character by randomly linked fragments as in a Judy Malloy hypertext; the possibilities are no doubt as rich and varied as in any other art form." - Robert Coover, The New York Times


This historic webpage was begun on Arts Wire in 1994. Although it is tweaked every year or so -- reflecting 29 years of a poet/researcher on the World Wide Web and 37 years as a poet/researcher online -- it purposefully retains vestiges of the original.

Contact me at jmalloy@well.com



Judy Malloy has walked with crutches since 1994 when a car ran directly into her leg.