Judy Malloy

Judy Malloy (born Judith Ann Powers, January 9, 1942, in Boston) is the artist who originated and orchestrated Scibe, and this wiki gives her an entry of her own because the work—and much of the world in these pages—runs through her. Poet and artist, she has worked for four decades where literature meets the network, and she is counted among the founders of electronic literature.

She was raised in Massachusetts; her mother was a journalist and newspaper editor, her father a Normandy veteran and United States attorney. At Middlebury College she studied literature, studio art, and art history. She then worked as a technical information specialist—at the Library of Congress, and for the NASA contractor Ball Brothers Research Corporation (Ball Aerospace), where she ran the technical library and learned FORTRAN to index its holdings; her own biographical note dates to 1969 her design and programming, at Ball Aerospace in Boulder, Colorado, of a computer catalog of library materials. In the mid-1970s she moved to California’s East Bay, and alongside installations and performances she began making artist’s books with non-sequential narratives—print works already behaving like hypertexts.

In 1986 she wrote and programmed Uncle Roger, described by Wikipedia as the first online hyperfiction project: a three-part “narrabase”—a narrative database—published on Art Com Electronic Network on The WELL, its interlocking story searched by keyword and Boolean operator rather than followed page by page. It ran serially in 1986–87, was sold on floppy disks through the Art Com catalog in 1987–88, and drew notice in the Wall Street Journal’s 1989 centennial publication as the start of a future art form.

The hypertext works followed. its name was Penelope was exhibited at the Richmond Art Center in 1989 and published by Eastgate Systems in 1993; it has since been emulated by The NEXT for modern readers. As artist-in-residence at Xerox PARC in 1993 she built Brown House Kitchen, an online narrative in the LambdaMOO virtual world; with PARC researcher Cathy Marshall she made Forward Anywhere (1993–96), a hypernarrative of exchanged lives, excerpted in Wired and published by Eastgate in 1995. l0ve0ne (1994) was the Eastgate Web Workshop’s first published work, and Making Art Online (1994), one of the earliest arts websites, is now hosted by the Walker Art Center.

Scibe came out of the work of those years and out of an accident. In July 1994 she was seriously injured; confined to bed in Tempe, Arizona, on a laptop lent by Xerox PARC’s Computer Science Lab, she began the work on August 17—asking her colleagues on the WELL and in ARTS WIRE’s Interactive Art Conference for windows onto their worlds, and writing back the hospital, the pain, and the poems they were sent. The work is hers in design and in narration; the seven other writers wrote toward her. The authors page sets out each writer’s part.

She was also an institution-builder and editor of the field’s record. She was coordinating editor of FineArt Forum (1988) and the first editor of Leonardo Electronic News (1991–93). Brought onto ARTS WIRE by its first network coordinator, Anna Couey, in 1993, she edited Arts Wire Current and its successor NYFA Current from 1996 to 2004. She edited Women, Art, and Technology (MIT Press, 2003) for the Leonardo book series and Social Media Archeology and Poetics (MIT Press, 2016), a media archaeology of the pre-web social platforms to which several of Scibe’s writers contributed essays.

The later record is one of recognition. She was a visiting lecturer at Princeton in 2013–14, teaching social media poetics and electronic literature, and a Digital Studies Fellow at Rutgers-Camden in 2016–17. In 2020 the Electronic Literature Organization gave her its Marjorie C. Luesebrink Career Achievement Award. Her papers are held as the Judy Malloy Papers at Duke University’s David M. Rubenstein Rare Book & Manuscript Library, whose guide spans 1956–2010—the archive of the field she helped start, kept by a library.

Sources and further reading