Judy Malloy's Uncle Roger
Judy Malloy's Biography
With a literary and visual arts background that includes artists books, text-based installation art, and narrative performance art, and with experience as a computer programmer for early library systems, Judy Malloy is a poet who works at the conjunction of hypernarrative, magic realism, and information art.
Her work with nonsequential literature began in 1976, the year she started exploring nonsequential narrative in experimental artists books. In subsequent years, she created a series of card catalog artists books that were first exhibited as a series in the exhibition Judy Malloy 3X5, Visual Card Catalogs at Artworks, in Venice, California in 1979. The first artists book in her series of push-button electromechanical books was created for her installation Technical Information at SITE in San Francisco in 1981. Then, in August of 1986, she began writing and programming the hyperfiction Uncle Roger, which was first released on the BBS of Art Com Electronic Network on the WELL in December 1986.
In addition to Uncle Roger, Judy Malloy’s electronic literature includes the generative hypertext its name was Penelope; (Richmond Art Center, 1999, Eastgate, 1993) called by writer and critic Robert Coover one of the classics of the “golden age” of hyperfiction; the polyphonic narrative Wasting Time; (After the Book, Perforations 3, Summer, 1992) the early web hyperfiction L0ve0ne; (Eastgate Web Workshop, 1994) the collaborative hyperfiction Forward Anywhere; (with Cathy Marshall, Eastgate, 1996, created under the auspices of Xerox PARC) Paths of Memory and Painting (2010) composed with composite arrays of hypertext lexias; and most recently, From Ireland with Letters, an epic polychoral electronic manuscript told in the public space of the Internet.
Her work has been exhibited and published internationally including the San Francisco Art Institute; Tisch School of the Arts, NYU; Sao Paulo Biennial; the Library of Congress, National Library of Madrid; National Library of Portugal, Lisbon; Los Angeles Institute for Contemporary Art; Boston Cyberarts Festival; Walker Art Center; Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, CA; University of Arizona Museum of Art; Visual Studies Workshop; the Electronic Literature Organization; Universite Paris I-Pantheon-Sorbonne; Eastgate Systems; E .P. Dutton; Tanam Press; Seal Press; MIT Press; The Iowa Review Web, and Blue Moon Review, among many others. Parts of her recent work, Paths of Memory and Painting, have been exhibited or presented at the Berkeley Center for New Media Roundtable, the E-Poetry Festival at the Center of Contemporary Art in Barcelona, and the University of California Irvine, as well as short listed for the Prix poesie-media 2009, Biennale Internationale des poetes en Val de Marne. In 2012, her work was given a retrospective at the Electronic Literature Organization Conference in Morgantown, West Virginia.
Her papers — including the original notebooks and programs for Uncle Roger and its name was Penelope — are archived as the Judy Malloy Papers at the David M. Rubenstein Rare Book & Manuscript Library at Duke University
Judy Malloy has also been active in documenting the electronic arts and is the host of Authoring Software, a resource for teachers and students. She has been an artist in residence and consultant in the document of the future for Xerox PARC, taught as Visiting Faculty in the Digital Media program at the San Francisco Art Institute and is a member of the Electronic Literature Organization’s Literary Advisory Board. In the fall semester of 2013, she is Anschutz Distinguished Fellow in American Studies at Princeton University, where she will be teaching a seminar on Social Media: History, Poetics, and Practice.
As an arts writer, she has worked most notably as Editor of the MIT Press book, Women, Art, and Technology, as Editor of The New York Foundation for the Arts’ NYFA Current, (originally Arts Wire Current) an Internet-based National journal on the arts and culture; and as an Associate Editor for Leonardo.
She believes that ideally print literature and electronic literature are parallel art forms where writers and artists in each medium understand each other’s vision and, as between poetry and fiction, sometimes move with ease between print and screen.
Versions of Uncle Roger
1.0 Net Versions: Malloy produced two versions of Uncle Roger for net access.
1.1: Serial novel published on Art Com Electronic Network (ACEN) on The WELL (Whole Earth ‘Lectric Link); "A Party in Woodside" (file 1), produced in BBS topic form, December 1, 1986-January 29, 1987; "The Blue Notebook" (file 2), July 1987
1.2: Interactive hyperfiction published on ACEN Datanet: "A Party in Woodside," produced with UNIX shell scripts, early 1987; "The Blue Notebook" also produced with UNIX shell scripts, is completed in 1988; "Terminals" (file 3) is published on ACEN Datanet in 1988 and was produced with UNIX shell scripts and in BASIC
2.0 Self-Published on Floppy Disks: Malloy produced in Narrabase and created a hand-crafted box containing all three 5 1/4 floppy disks each containing one of the three parts of Uncle Roger. This version was sold through the Art Com catalog beginning 1988.
3.0 Web Version: Realizing that Uncle Roger was inaccessible with current computer technology, Malloy produced a web version. It was published on The WELL in 2012. The site also provides access to a recreation of the 1986-1988 BASIC version of Uncle Roger through a DOSbox emulator.