Scibe, the work

My Name is Scibe—styled by its author name is scibe—is a collaborative hyperfiction of sixty-seven lexias, written by eight writers and posted between August 17 and November 25, 1994, simultaneously on ARTS WIRE and on The WELL. It is at once a work of hyperfiction, a document of two online communities, and a primary source for the history of electronic literature.

It began with an accident. Judy Malloy had been seriously injured in July 1994 and was confined to bed in Tempe, Arizona, on a laptop lent by the Computer Science Lab at Xerox PARC. On August 17 she began with an error for a name: between life and the net, she asked for “Scribe” and was given “Scibe” by the Wizards of the system. Writing as Scibe, she wrote out the pain—the hospital, the waiting rooms, the rods in her legs—and asked the people in her two online rooms for the one thing a sickroom cannot supply: windows on the world.

The collaboration was, in her words, “hoped for but not asked for”. Writers in The WELL’s arts conference and in ARTS WIRE’s Interactive Art Conference began posting the details of their own lives toward her—Tom Igoe from a borrowed apartment in Boston, Chris Abraham from the road, Tim Collins walking Carson Street in Pittsburgh with Reiko Goto beside him, Valerie Gardiner crossing the country by car, Anna Couey, Joseph Wilson, Doug Cohen. Each piece kept the header it was posted under—conference number, name, date—and the headers are part of the work: they are how a reader in 1994 knew whose window they were looking through. The last dated posting, November 25, 1994, also stands on the title page, where the work both begins and ends.

The form is a web, not a chain. From the first lexia two strands open—to lexias 2 and 51—and interweave through dreams, hospitals, highways, and kitchens; each page offers its choices in the conferencing idiom of its rooms. In the terms George Landow gave the field, the structure is networked rather than axial: no single path is the story, and the story is the web with the narrator at its center. The sixty-sixth lexia points outward, to the ARTS WIRE edition at tmn.com, and home again.

The work was published on the web on both ARTS WIRE and The WELL. The ARTS WIRE copy, served from tmn.com, has not survived: its addresses are dead, and the Wayback Machine holds only the server’s error pages for them. The WELL copy survives entire—sixty-nine pages and three images, every internal link still resolving when this edition was spidered from it in October 2026. The colophon sets out what was found and what was done.

The scholarly record has kept the work in view. The ELMCIP Electronic Literature Knowledge Base carries it (1994; tagged collaborative, hypertext, accident, pain). Malloy’s paper for the 2024 Electronic Literature Conference recounts its making among her works and names the participants, including the credit “Tim Collins (with Reiko Goto)”, and scholarship on collaborative hypertext treats the work as an early exemplar of the form—a work that originated, as one study puts it, out of a need for dialogue during a long period of hospitalization. Wikipedia’s article on Malloy lists it among her selected works with all eight writers named.

This preservation edition clones the WELL original in a new frame and adds a reading of every page, one voice per writer, keeping text and links as written in 1994. Begin at the title page; the eight writers are listed at who; how the edition was made, and on what terms it stands, is in the colophon.

Sources and further reading