1980s

PataLiterator was a HyperCard system authored by mIEKAL aND, that manufactures a neologistic vocabulary, hence literature, by generating either single words or texts up to forty pages using an amenable database of phonemes and syllables. PataLiterator attempts to apply "the art of hyperpataphysics" to Alfred Jarry's late-nineteenth-century proclamations. The work opens with a screen that shows Jarry's "Ubu" and presents four buttons "About", "Help", "Start" and "More". The interface allow the viewers to produce text and alter the databases that feed the output.

(Source: Prehistoric Digital Poetry: An Archaeology of Forms by C.T Funkhouser)

Based on television footage from Jason Nelson’s childhood in the 1980s, such as Frankenstein reruns, news coverage of President Reagan, ads for Pacman pasta, bubble gum, and dinoriders, this series of narratives and poems are structured on graphs that are as absurd as the footage itself. The graphs and their accompanying narrative and poetic texts chronicle the rise and fall of characters, a President, secret organizations, and the physical and mental health of gum chewers. Characteristically witty and incisive, Nelson’s writing thrives as a Postmodern critique of culture and politics. At the same time, there is a personal touch to his work, as we can reconstruct aspects of his childhood through the video clips, all evidence of the electronic and physical toys (and their power sources), film and food, and a link to politics and the Cold War— with the terrifying specter of nuclear war hovering over it all. With that in mind, read carefully Nelson’s word choices throughout this work to discover a subtext more poignant than snarky commentary. (Source: Leonardo Flores, I ♥ E-Poetry)

The Card Catalogs (1976-1981; first exhibited in 1978) are collections of text and images on 3x5 cards.  Each catalog is a tray of cards containing 50-200 cards structured  by dividers that key the cards using small pictures or word phrases.  Although they can be read sequentially, they were meant to be non-sequential works that combine words and pictures so that neither are the words descriptions of the pictures nor are the pictures illustrations of the words. For example, the Woodpile  consists of 165  nodes of photos drawings or text, keyed by small photos and drawings.  Each node stands by itself but also functions as a molecular unit that, when combined with  other cards, builds up a story. As opposed to a linear book where the reader focuses on the front cover and normally proceeds linearly from there, the reader approaching a card catalog like The Woodpile sees the top of the entire work and is encouraged to begin at any place.

The electromechanical books (begun in 1982) house narrative information in battery-operated "address books." They are read by pushing buttons on the front which causes a series of images and text mounted inside to revolve and to be displayed on a small screen. The buttons can be pushed either sequentially or at random. Some electronic books were created as scrolls where pushing a button advances the narrative.

The Card Catalogs and Electronic Books were exhibited Internationally including at  Artworks, Venice, CA; the Berkeley Art Center;  Franklin Furnace, NY;  the Houston Center for Photography;  the Cleveland Institute of Art;  U.C. Irvine Fine Arts Center;  Texas Women's University;  CameraWork, San Francisco; Selby Gallery, Ringling School of Art and Design;  San Antonio Art Institute;  National Library of Madrid, Madrid, Spain; Eaton/Shoen Gallery, San Francisco;  University of Arizona Museum of Art; University of New Mexico Museum of Art; and the Walker Art Center,  among others.

The Card Catalogs and Electronic Books are documented in:Judy Malloy, "Uncle Roger, an Online Narrabase" in Connectivity: Art and Interactive Telecommunications, edited by Roy Ascott and Carl E. Loeffler. Leonardo 24:2, 1991.  pp. 195-202

In the spring of 1986, Judy Malloy was invited by video and performance art curator Carl Loeffler to go online and write on the seminal Art Com Electronic Network (ACEN) on The WELL where ACEN Datanet, an early online publication, would soon feature actual works of art, including works by John Cage, Jim Rosenberg, and Malloy's Uncle Roger. In August 1986, Malloy began writing and designing the interface for the hyperfictional narrative database, Uncle Roger. Originally this work was published as a series of three files on the Well. It has been described as a "database narrative", though it could equally be described as a hypertext fiction. Each node consists of a paragraph or two of text. Below the text is a list of links, each leading to a new node. Malloy describes the story thus: "Uncle Roger is a work of narrative poetry written in the tradition of Greek and Shakespearean comedy. The work is mainly set at a series of parties that are observed by a narrator, who in telling the story intertwines elements of magic realism with Silicon Valley culture and semiconductor industry lore." The author adapted the text and interface  for the web in 1995, and again in 2003 and 2011. The 2011 version is the only version that is still accessible. The writing of the three files that comprise Uncle Roger was influenced by Malloy's experimental artists books, by her experience with database programming, by the slide-based narratives she performed at alternative art spaces in the early 80's, and by scene-based early comedy.  Uncle Roger was released on ACEN in 1986 as a narrative intervention and published online as an interactive hypertext on ACEN Datanet in 1987. (programmed with UNIX shell scripts,  partially funded by the California Arts Council and Art Matters) In 1987, Malloy created an Apple II disk version. (using BASIC)  which was distributed by Art Com and traveled internationally in a series of exhibitions that included Ultimatum II, Images du Futur '87; (Montreal) Art Com Software: Tisch School of the Arts, New York University, San Jose State University, the University of Colorado, Ars Electronica, Carnegie Melon University; and A Space in Toronto. In 1989, Uncle Roger was included in the Centennial issue of The Wall Street Journal.  To experience the work, the reader follows link-based searches through a database of several hundreds of lexias, and like a guest at a real party, hears parts of conversations, observes strangers, and meets old friends. 

Andy Campbell and Judi Alston’s The Nightingale’s Playground is a digital fiction work that was created with Flash in 2010. The main character is Carl Robertson, who tries to figure out what has happened to his lost high-school friend Alex Nightingale. The piece leads the reader/player through a world experienced from Carl’s perspective. It consists of four individual parts, the first section “Consensus”, an interactive point- and click game that can be played online, downloadable “Consensus II” which transports the reader into a dark 3D flat with text snippets , the “Fieldwork book” is a browser based grungy sketchbook with puzzling notes and the last part is a PDF version of the story.