Judy Malloy

Judy Malloy (born Judith Ann Powers; January 9, 1942) is an American poet whose works embrace the intersection of hypernarrative, magic realism, and information art.

Malloy moved to the East Bay in the mid 1970s and lived in Berkeley where, in addition to installations and performances, she developed a series of artist's books that incorporated non-sequential narratives driven by words and images.

Her papers are currently being collected by the David M. Rubenstein Rare Book & Manuscript Library at Duke University.

Beginning with Uncle Roger in 1986, Malloy has composed works in both new media literature and hypertext fiction.

She was an early creator of online interactive and collaborative fiction on The WELL and the website ArtsWire.

Malloy has served as editor and leader for books and web projects.

Her literary works have been exhibited worldwide.

In 1986, Malloy wrote and programmed Uncle Roger, the first online hyperfiction project with links that took the narrative in different directions depending on the reader's choice.

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) bulletin board.

The Wall Street Journal mentioned Uncle Roger as the start of a future art form in their 1989 centennial publication.

Uncle Roger was a three-part hypertextual "narrabase" (narrative database) that used keyword searching (including Boolean operators) and appeared on Art Com Electronic Network on the WELL.

Malloy's hyperfiction work its name was Penelope was exhibited in 1989 at the Richmond Art Center and published in 1993 by Eastgate Systems.

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 artists' "Words on Works" (WOW) Project, published in Leonardo Electronic News and Leonardo.

Also in 1993, Malloy was invited to XEROX PARC as an artist-in-residence, where she developed Brown House Kitchen, an online narrative written in LambdaMOO.

Between 1993 and 1996, while working with PARC, Malloy and Cathy Marshall (hypertext developer) collaborated on this work, which was a hypernarrative based on emails between them in which they sought "to exchange the remembered and day-to-day substance of our lives".

They wrote an article, "Closure Was Never a Goal in this Piece", in the book Wired Women which documented their experiences working on this project.

Malloy wrote of this project that it was aa response to Xerox PARC's artist-in-residence program.

This early work experimented with reader interaction, with "Forward" using hypertext links and Anywhere using a random number generator to present pieces in a random order.Women, Art, and Technology

Other Hypertext fiction includes

Malloy worked for Arts Wire, a program of the New York Foundation for the Arts (NYFA) from its early origins in 1993.

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.

The Yellow Bowl

Forward/Anywhere: Notes on an Exchange between Intersecting Lives.

lOveOne, 1994

In 1995, Malloy moved this and other "narrabase" projects to the Web.

The Roar of Destiny, 1997

Dorothy Abrona McCrae, 2000

A Party at Silver Beach (2003; 2012)

Spring Day Notation, 2010

Emanated from the Refrigerator

Recently she has been a Digital Studies Fellow at the Rutgers Camden Digital Studies Center (2016-2017) and a Visiting Lecturer at Princeton University in Social Media Poetics (2013) and Electronic Literature (2014).

Born in Boston a month after the attack on Pearl Harbor, Malloy was raised in Massachusetts.

Her mother was a journalist and newspaper editor, and her father, a Normandy veteran, worked as an assistant district attorney in two Massachusetts counties and then as Chief Assistant US Attorney for Massachusetts.

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 Congress; she also traveled in Europe.

In the next few years, while writing and making art, Malloy worked as a technical information specialist at the NASA contractor Ball Brothers Research Corporation, running their technical library and learning FORTRAN programming in order to identify relevant content for research.