Judy Malloy is a poet whose works embrace the intersection of hypernarrative,
magic realismMagic realism or magical realism is an aesthetic style or genre of fiction in which magical elements blend with the real world. The story explains these magical elements as real occurrences, presented in a straightforward manner that places the "real" and the "fantastic" in the same stream of...
, and
information artInformation art is an emerging field of electronic art that synthesizes computer science, information technology, and more classical forms of art, including performance art, visual art, new media art and conceptual art...
. Beginning with
Uncle Roger in 1986, Malloy has composed works in both
new mediaNew media is a broad term in media studies that emerged in the latter part of the 20th century. For example, new media holds out a possibility of on-demand access to content any time, anywhere, on any digital device, as well as interactive user feedback, creative participation and community...
literature and
hypertext fictionHypertext fiction is a genre of electronic literature, characterized by the use of hypertext links which provides a new context for non-linearity in "literature" and reader interaction. The reader typically chooses links to move from one node of text to the next, and in this fashion arranges a...
. She was an early creator of online interactive and
collaborative fictionCollaborative fiction is a form of writing by a group of authors who share creative control of a story.Collaborative fiction can occur for commercial gain, as part of education, or recreationally - many collaboratively written works have been the subject of a large degree of academic research.-...
on
The WELL- Titled works :* The Well , 1986 novel by Elizabeth JolleyMusical albums:* The Well , by Waking Ashland* The Well, 2001, by Jennifer Warnes* The Well, a song from the "Come to the Well" album by christian group Casting Crowns...
and Arts Wire.
Malloy has served as editor and leader for books and web projects. Her literary works have been exhibited worldwide.
Biography
Born as
Judith Ann Powers in Boston a month after
Pearl HarborThe attack on Pearl Harbor was a surprise military strike conducted by the Imperial Japanese Navy against the United States naval base at Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, on the morning of December 7, 1941...
, Malloy was raised in Massachusetts. Her mother was a writer and editor and her father, a Normandy veteran, worked as assistant district attorney in two Massachusetts counties and then as
Chief Assistant US Attorney for MassachusettsThe United States District Court for the District of Massachusetts is the federal district court whose jurisdiction is the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, USA. The first court session was held in Boston in 1789. The second term was held in Salem in 1790 and until 1813 court session locations...
. Malloy skied and played tennis, summering in New Hampshire, Cape Cod and the Berkshires. Malloy felt an early calling to the visual arts and began painting and sketching as a child.
After graduating from Middlebury College with a degree in literature and work in studio art and art history, Malloy took a job at the
Library of CongressThe Library of Congress is the research library of the United States Congress, de facto national library of the United States, and the oldest federal cultural institution in the United States. Located in three buildings in Washington, D.C., it is the largest library in the world by shelf space and...
and also traveled in Europe.
In the next few years, while writing and making art, Malloy worked as a technical information specialist at the
NASAThe National Aeronautics and Space Administration is the agency of the United States government that is responsible for the nation's civilian space program and for aeronautics and aerospace research...
contractor
Ball Brothers Research CorporationBall Corporation , originally Ball Brothers Glass Manufacturing Company, is an American company famous for producing glass canning jars. Founded in 1880, it is currently headquartered in Broomfield, Colorado. The company has expanded into other areas such as avionics, space systems, metal beverage...
, running their technical library and learning
FORTRANFortran is a general-purpose, procedural, imperative programming language that is especially suited to numeric computation and scientific computing...
programming in order to identify relevant content for research.
Moving to the
East BayThe East Bay is a commonly used, informal term for the lands on the eastern side of the San Francisco Bay, in the San Francisco Bay Area, in California, United States...
in the early 1970s, Malloy lived in Berkeley where, in addition to installations and performances, she developed a series of artists books that incorporated non-sequential narratives driven by words and images. She currently resides in
El Sobrante, CaliforniaEl Sobrante is a census-designated place in Contra Costa County, California, United States. The population was 12,669 at the 2010 census...
.
Online
In 1986, Malloy wrote and programmed
Uncle Roger, the first online
hyperfictionHypertext fiction is a genre of electronic literature, characterized by the use of hypertext links which provides a new context for non-linearity in "literature" and reader interaction. The reader typically chooses links to move from one node of text to the next, and in this fashion arranges a...
project with links that took the narrative different directions depending on the reader's choice.
Uncle Roger was mentioned as the start of a future art form by the Wall Street Journal in their 1989 centennial publication. It was a three part hypertextual "narrabase" (narrative database) that used keyword searching including Boolean operators appeared on Art Com Electronic Network on the WELL.
In 1988, Malloy became the coordinating editor of FineArt Forum under the Leonardo publishing umbrella, and developed F. A. S. T. (Fine Art Science and Technology), a resource on the
Whole Earth 'Lectronic Link (The WELL)- Titled works :* The Well , 1986 novel by Elizabeth JolleyMusical albums:* The Well , by Waking Ashland* The Well, 2001, by Jennifer Warnes* The Well, a song from the "Come to the Well" album by christian group Casting Crowns...
bulletin board. Malloy was the initial editor of
Leonardo Electronic News, 1991–1993, now
Leonardo Electronic Almanac. For Leonardo, she worked to make the work of new media artists more visible, creating the artist's "Words on Works" (WOW) Project, published in
Leonardo Electronic News and
Leonardo.
In 1989, Malloy's hyperfiction work
its name was Penelope was exhibited at the Richmond Art Center, gaining publication in 1993 by
Eastgate SystemsEastgate Systems is a publisher and software company headquartered in Watertown, Massachusetts, which publishes hypertexts by established authors with careers in print as well as by talented new authors...
. Also in 1993, Malloy was invited to XEROX PARC as artist-in-residence, where she developed
Brown House Kitchen, an online narrative written in
LambdaMOOLambdaMOO is an online community of the variety called a MOO. It is the oldest MOO today.LambdaMOO was founded in late 1990 or early 1991 by Pavel Curtis at Xerox PARC. Now hosted in the state of Washington, it is operated and administered entirely on a volunteer basis...
. Malloy then wrote
l0ve0ne, published in 1994 by Eastgate Web Workshop as their first work. Malloy created Making Art Online] in 1994. One of the first arts websites, Making Art Online is currently hosted by the Walker Art Center.
Between 1993 and 1996, while working with PARC, Malloy and
Cathy Marshall (hypertext developer)Cathy Marshall is a Principal Researcher in Microsoft Research's Silicon Valley Lab. She is currently working on Community Information Management applications and issues associated with personal digital archiving...
collaborated on "Closure Was Never a Goal in this Piece", an article published in the book
Wired Women which documented their experiences working on their other project,
Forward AnywhereForward Anywhere is a hypertext narrative created by writer Judy Malloy and scientist Cathy Marshall. They started working together in 1993 through the PAIR program at the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center...
: Notes on an Exchange between Intersecting Lives, a hypernarrative work based on electronic communication that passed between the two in which they sought "to exchange the remembered and day-to-day substance of our lives".
Malloy worked for Arts Wire, a program of the
New York Foundation for the ArtsThe New York Foundation for the Arts was created in conjunction the in 1971. The organization gives grants to individual artists and writers and developing arts organizations with a mission to '.'-NYFA's Programs:...
(NYFA) from its early origins in 1993. She began serving as editor of the online periodical
Arts Wire Current in March 1996. She continued as editor through the periodical's name change to
NYFA Current in November, 2002, until March 2004.
Malloy is the editor of
Women, Art & Technology, a documentation on the central role of female artists in the development of new media. The book lays out a historical outline of the female influence in art and technology including papers written by notable members of the field. Published in 2003 by MIT Press in 2003. Her most recent work is the new media poetry trilogy
Paths of Memory and Painting which she finished in 2010.
Her work has been exhibited and published internationally including the 2008 Electronic Literature Conference,
San Francisco Art InstituteSan Francisco Art Institute is a school of higher education in contemporary art with the main campus in the Russian Hill district of San Francisco, California. Its graduate center is in the Dogpatch neighborhood. The private, non-profit institution is accredited by WASC and is a member of the...
,
Tisch School of the ArtsTisch School of the Arts is one of the 15 schools that make up New York University ....
, New York University,
São Paulo Art BiennialThe São Paulo Art Biennial was founded in 1951 and has been held every two years since. It is the second oldest art biennial in the world after the Venice Biennial , which serves as its role model....
, the Los Angeles Institute for Contemporary Art,
Boston Cyberarts FestivalThe Boston Cyberarts Festival is the first and largest Festival of digital art, performance and film created using new technology in the USA. Around 22,000 people attended the Festival in 2007 where they witnessed the work of over 200 artists from all over the world.The Festival takes place once...
, the
Walker Art CenterThe Walker Art Center is a contemporary art center in Minneapolis, Minnesota, United States. The Walker is considered one of the nation's "big five" museums for modern art along with the Museum of Modern Art, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Guggenheim Museum and the Hirshhorn...
, Visual Studies Workshop, Berkeley Art Center, Finger Lakes Environmental Film Festival, Centenary of Carmen Conde, Cartagena, Spain, Istanbul Contemporary Art Museum and the Hellenic American Union in Athens, Houston Center for Photography, Richmond Art Center, San Antonio Art Institute, A Space, Toronto, Canada, National Library of Madrid,
Eastgate SystemsEastgate Systems is a publisher and software company headquartered in Watertown, Massachusetts, which publishes hypertexts by established authors with careers in print as well as by talented new authors...
,
E. P. DuttonE. P. Dutton was an American book publishing company founded as a book retailer in Boston, Massachusetts in 1852 by Edward Payson Dutton. In 1986, the company was acquired by Penguin Group and split into two imprints: Dutton Penguin and Dutton Children's Books.-History:Edward Payson Dutton founded...
, Tanam Press, Seal Press,
MIT PressThe MIT Press is a university press affiliated with the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge, Massachusetts .-History:...
,
The Iowa Review WebThe Iowa Review is an American literary magazine that publishes fiction, poetry, essays, and reviews.Founded in 1970, this magazine is issued three times a year, during the months of April, August, and December. Originally, it was released on a quarterly basis. This frequency of publication lasted...
, and Blue Moon Review. Malloy's
where every luminous landscape (2008) was exhibited at The Future of Writing,
University of California, IrvineThe University of California, Irvine , founded in 1965, is one of the ten campuses of the University of California, located in Irvine, California, USA...
, November, 2008 and the E-Poetry Festival, Barcelona, May, 2009. In May 2009 it was a finalist in the
prix poésie-média 2009 hosted by the
Biennale Internationale des poetes (BIPVAL) in Val de Marne, France.
Art California Web
Malloy is the host of the Art California Web, in partnership with the California Studies Association. The website is a portal to information regarding artist and art organizations in California. The primary focus is to encourage California art, with a list of over 6,000 mainstream and non-profit artists and organizations.
Selected works
- Artists Books (1977–1993)
- Landscape Projects (1978–)
- Installations (1979–1995)
- Uncle Roger (1986–1987) (2003 revised edition)
- Bad Information (1986–1988)
- OK Research, OK Genetic Engineering (1988) information art describes technology
- YOU! (1991), online poem with multiple contributors, programmed and produced by Judy Malloy
- Wasting Time, A Narrative Data Structure (1992)
- its name was Penelope (1993)
- l0ve0ne (1994)
- name is scibe (1994) a collaboratively created hyperfiction by Judy Malloy, Tom Igoe, Chris Abraham, Tim Collins, Anna Couey, Valerie Gardiner, Joseph Wilson and Doug Cohen
- The Roar of Destiny Emanated From the Refrigerator (1995–1999) an epic hyperpoem
- Forward Anywhere (1995), a collaborative hyperfiction by Judy Malloy and Cathy Marshall
- Dorothy Abrona McCrae (2000)
- Interlude — Dorothy and Sid (2001)
- A Party At Silver Beach (2002)
- Afterwards (2003)
- Revelations of Secret Surveillance (2004–2007)
- Concerto for Narrative Data (2005–2006, 2008)
- The Wedding Celebration of Gunter and Gwen (2006–2007)
- where every luminous landscape (2008)
External links