"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)
"Nicely evocative ... the effect is remarkably close to the subjective quirkiness of memory, of past moments floating unpredictably to the surface."
-- Richard Grant, Washington Post Book WWorld
its name was Penelope,
Eastgate Systems, Cambridge, MA, 1993;
Narrabase Press, 1990
The iPad edition of its name was Penelope
is in press from Eastgate
Meanwhile, here is how to run the BASIC scholars' version of its name was Penelope on DOSBox
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
Judy Malloy Papers,
Rare Book, Manuscript,
and Special
Collections Library, Duke University
Artists Books, Installations, Performances
Memories of Arts Wire
Memories of Art Com and La Mamelle
Remembering Judith Hoffberg
".... 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
"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
Judy Malloy and Cathy Marshall, Forward Anywhere
Eastgate Systems, 1996.
A second edition is in progress.
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.
We embarked on our collaboration as participants in Xerox PARC's Artist-In-Residence Program, a program that brings together artists and research scientists to build bridges between the two communities. Our project was a multi-year experiment: to exchange the remembered and day-to-day substance of our lives.
Judy: Typically in artist originated collaborations on the Internet, an artist comes up with an idea and a framework/structure and sets it out where it is responded to or shaped. Forward Anywhere seems more related to group installations that I have been involved in with other artists where we all worked (on an equal basis) on a piece of an installation, meeting occasionally to exchange ideas, and shape coherency of content, visual appearance, and space overlap, but essentially each making our own separate but integrally related part of a loosely linked whole.
During the writing of Forward Anywhere, I continually experienced the same sense of pleased surprise that I experienced during the final installation of Monumental Women when I watched a painted swimming pool on the floor, a spiral tower of yellow bricks, a thousand white origami cranes emerge beside me as I worked.
Forward Anywhere was produced at Xerox PARC in Palo Alto beginning in 1994. 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
"...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 Almanaac "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 will be included in Dene Grigar's exhibition at Beyond GRAMMATRON: 20 Years into the Future British Computer Society, Covent Garden, London, September, 2017.
l0ve0ne
Cambridge, MA: Eastgate Web Workshop, 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 been translated into Polish by Mariusz Pisarski and Zuzanna Grochulska.
"The sunlight -- that entered the dark barn with us through the door from the outside -- fell on the carcass of a rare Apple III that lay dormant on the ground near the entrance.
Superceded crts, controller cards, motherboards of every era, power supplies, Ethernet cards, Hercules cards, abandoned hard drives, external faxmodems, tape drives, high capacity tape backup systems lay on makeshift tables, or on the floor, or on bales of yellow hay in the cow stalls."
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 buut it is also a
must-have..." - Dene Grigar, American Book Review
Judy Malloy, Social Media Archeology and Poetics, MIT Press, 2016
"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
The Interactive Art Conference
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.
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...."
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.
Part-time Faculty, 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. 2019 CV
New: Arriving Simultaneously on Multiple Far-Flung Systems. Premiered this August at ELO2018, Université du Québec à Montréal. Shortlisted for the 2018 Robert Coover prize for the year's best work of electronic literature.
New: Contemporary Social Media Platforms and Creative Practice
SAIC ATS Social Media Narratives, November, 2018
Foreword, New Media Futures
The Rise of Women in the Digital Arts, edited by Donna Cox et al., University of Illinois Press, 2018
Social Media Archeology and Poetics,
MIT Press, 2016
Shortlisted for the 2017 Hayles Prize
In progress, 2019 reconstruction of The Yellow Bowl, written in BASIC in 1992
The Yellow Bowl, Performance Reading, ELO2019, Cork, Ireland, July 2019.
Networked Projects in the Formative Years of the Internet: Working Report No. 1
"... narratives of pre-web social media projects created by artists, arts organizations, researchers, and community networkers not only contribute to the archeology of social media but also nurture innovation in contemporary social media."
2017: "the whole room like a picture in a dream": Dorothy Richardson and Virginia Woolf Writing
2017-2019 conferences, book chapters, exhibitions. and honors
___"Conveying Diaspora in a Polyphonic Electronic Manuscript", Special issue on "Other Codes", Hyperrhiz_ New Media Cultures, in press 2019
___Host, "Contemporary Social Media Platforms and Creative Practice", SAIC ATS, Facebook and Twitter, November 1-6, 2018
Documentation published in content | code | process, February, 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
___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.
___Program Commitee for the
First Workshop on the History of
Expressive Systems. November 14, 2017.
___The Roar of Destiny is featured in
"Beyond GRAMMATRON: 20 Years into the Future"
hosted by the British Computer Society, September 14-15, 2017
___"its Name was Penelope, a Generative Hypertext" in Maria Mencia, ed., #WomenTechLit, West Virginia University Press, 2017
___"As if the memory was a song: From Ireland with Letters: Conveying Diaspora in a Polyphonic Electronic Manuscript," Other Codes / Cóid Eile: Digital Literatures in Context, Galway Digital Cultures Initiative Conference, NUI, Galway, 11-12 May 2017. video of talk. text of talk
___It's name was Penelope in the exhibition NL||LE at California College of the Arts, San Francisco, CA, through May 5, 2017
in press:
Judy Malloy, "'A WAY IS OPEN', Allusion, Identity, Authoring System, and Audience in Early Text-Based Electronic Literature" for Contexts, Forms, and Practices of Electronic Literature. edited by Dene Grigar and James O'Sullivan, West Virginia University Press, in press, 2017
2016 Highlights:
The Eastgate Its name was Penelope at the U.C. Berkeley Doe Library, March - August 2016 in an exhibition curated by Elika Ortega and Alex Saum-Pascual, that explored the relationships of English language electronic literature with Spanish and Portuguese language works
For the 2016 USC-based Humanities and Critical Code Studies Lab's Critical Studies Working Group, I reconstructed the BASIC version of its name was Penelope
The 20th anniversary edition of
The Roar of Destiny premiered at the 2016 Electronic Literature Organization international conference, at the University of Victoria, in Victoria, B.C. in June, 2016.
Another Party in Woodside won Second Prize in the short story division of the Neukom Institute for Computational Science at Dartmouth's Turing Test in the Computational Arts.
Three versions of the 1991-1992 narrative data structure, Wasting Time were explored in Matthew Kirschenbaum's extraordinary Rosenbach Lectures at Penn.
The BASIC version of Uncle Roger was included in vol 3 of the Electronic Literature Collection.
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 recently 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, including its name was Penelope, which was called one of the early classics of electronic literature by Robert Coover. 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
Her work has been exhibited and published internationally including, among many others, the Library of Congress; Tisch School of the Arts; Sao Paulo Biennial; 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; MIT Press; The Iowa Review Web, Blue Moon Review, and the Biennale Internationale des poetes en Val de Marne, where her work was short listed for the Prix poesie-media 2009. Her current work, From Ireland with Letters premiered at Judy Malloy: Retrospective at the 2012 Electronic Literature Organization Conference in 2012 and was on exhibition in 2013 at Les litteratures numeriques d'hier a demain, Bibliotheque Nationale de France, Paris, France. Recently, her work was featured in the exhibition Pathfinders: 25 Years of Experimental Literary Art at MLA2014 and her artists books were featured in Versions: Kristin Lucas and Judy Malloy at krowswork in Oakland in 2015. An iPad edition of her classic hyperfiction, its name was Penelope (Cambridge, MA: Eastgate) is in press.
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" is in press for Contexts, Forms, and Practices of Electronic Literature, forthcoming from West Virginia University Press. Her papers are archived as The Judy Malloy Papers at the David M. Rubenstein Rare Book & Manuscript Library at Duke University.
"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
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.
Part VII, "The Not Yet Named Jig", was performed in a generative reading at the 2015 Electronic Literature Organization Conference in Bergen, Norway. Parts I-V were on exhibition in Les littératures numériques d'hier á demain at the Bibliothèque Nationale de France, Paris, France, September 24 thru December 1, 2013 and were displayed on the plasma screen at FILE 2012 - Electronic Language International Festival, Sao Paulo, Brazil, July 16 - August 19, 2012. 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 November, 2016.
"...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
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.
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 andd 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."
"...looping in my mind,nested with brief dreams and nightmares..."
Uncle Roger - 30th Anniversary: 1986-2016
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
"...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
"...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...
Deep background: My work began with a dual career as artist/writer and as editor/information specialist working at jobs that included Union Catalog searcher/editor for the Library of Congress, Technical Librarian for Ball Brothers Research Corporation in Boulder, Colorado, where in 1969 I designed and worked as a programmer for an innovative computer catalog of the library's holdings; 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.
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.
This historic webpage was begun on Arts Wire in 1994. Although it is tweaked every year or so -- reflecting 23 years of a poet/researcher on the World Wide Web and 31 years as a poet/researcher online -- it retains vestiges of the original. Last update, November 20, 2017. Contact me at jmalloy@well.com
