The writers

Scibe’s byline lists eight names. The first is Judy Malloy, who has her own entry. The other seven are gathered here, in the order the authors page sets out their parts. What follows is only what the public record supports; where the record is thin, this entry says so and stops—the fuller account of each writer is their writing in the work itself, which the authors page indexes page by page.

Tom Igoe. Second in the byline; the headers of lexias 5 and 20 are his, and he is named in lexia 7. In the work he is writing from a borrowed apartment in Boston. His documented later career is in physical computing: he is an Arts Professor at New York University’s Interactive Telecommunications Program (ITP) in the Tisch School of the Arts, where he serves as area head for physical computing, and he is a co-founder of Arduino, the open-source microcontroller environment. His books include Physical Computing (with Dan O’Sullivan) and Making Things Talk. The line from a conferencing system in 1994 to a classroom of sensing, answering objects is not hard to see: both are about what computers are for between people.

Chris Abraham. Third in the byline; fifteen lexias carry his header.

Tim Collins. An environmental artist. Three lexias carry his header (11, 27, 48); in them he is walking Carson Street in Pittsburgh, and Reiko Goto walks beside him in lexia 11 and is named in lexia 13. A paper at the 2024 Electronic Literature Conference credits the strand accordingly: “Tim Collins (with Reiko Goto)”. Collins and Goto have worked together since 1985; in Pittsburgh they later became fellows at Carnegie Mellon University’s STUDIO for Creative Inquiry, where they co-directed the Nine Mile Run and 3 Rivers 2nd Nature projects. They are now principals of the Collins & Goto Studio in Glasgow. Both were artists-in-residence in ARTS WIRE’s Interactive Art Conference—the room where the ARTS WIRE half of Scibe was written.

Anna Couey. An artist and editor in the Bay Area telecommunications-art community: co-host of Art Com Electronic Network on The WELL, the electronic exhibition space where Malloy had published Uncle Roger. One lexia (16) carries her header and she is named in another (18), but her hand in Scibe is larger than her count. She was ARTS WIRE’s first network coordinator; she brought Malloy onto its staff in 1993; and with Malloy she founded the Interactive Art Conference that same year. Earlier, with Penny Boyer, she had been a first editor of Hotwire, the newsletter that became Arts Wire Current.

Valerie Gardiner. Nine lexias carry her header—the third-largest share of the work—and in them she is crossing the country by car, posting the road into a sickroom: motels, weather, the long middle of America. The public record consulted for this wiki says little more about her, and this entry will not invent the rest. Her windows are in the work.

Joseph Wilson. Five lexias carry his header (41, 45, 59, 62, 65). As with Gardiner, the record beyond the work itself is thin, and the honest entry is the work: five headers, and the pages under them.

Doug Cohen. One lexia (63) carries his header, signed “douglas — sternklang dogs”, and his name is spoken inside two others. He was a composer active in ARTS WIRE’s music community: with Pauline Oliveros and David Mahler he coordinated NewMusNet, one of ARTS WIRE’s first interest groups, from the summer of 1992—a virtual place for the performance, composition, and discussion of new music. The byline prints his name as “Douglas Cohen”; the 1994 copyright line prints “Doug Cohen”; both forms stand, as the record gives them.

Sources and further reading