Presented at conference or festival

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. 

The Diary of an Absence aims to be an example of intimate personal writing through something which has been put into words but which perhaps should have remained unsaid. Arranged in the form of a diary, this narrative follows the paths of absence by delving into the pain that is caused by desire, a desire that is reflected in this particular box of raptures in the face of a separation from the loved one. To the idea of introspection arising from the exercise of spiritual reflection and the flood of torn feelings that this brings, there appears the idea of the house as a cloister, which is the scenario in which the tale in our hypertext exercise has been set. A closed space, with rooms to walk through, just as we travel different routes when we go deeper into the intimate truth of the suffering narrator. The apparently illogical ups and downs of the narrator’s thoughts are metaphorically translated into the maze where the reader gets lost, this reader who has come in search of words that will lead towards the interior that tells a story of love, of the loss of love, of passion and of impossibility. The Diary is an eminently textual product, situated in a determinate visual and musical dimension, which offers the reader a pilgrimage, a journey to be undertaken.

(Source: Laura Borras: "Growing up digital: the emergence of e-lit communities in Spain. The case of Catalonia 'and the rest is literature'.")

Sea and Spar Between is a poetry generator which defines a space of language populated by a number of stanzas comparable to the number of fish in the sea, around 225 trillion. Each stanza is indicated by two coordinates, as with latitude and longitude. The words in Sea and Spar Between come from Emily Dickinson’s poems and Herman Melville’s Moby Dick. Certain compound words (kennings) are assembled from words used frequently by one or both. Sea and Spar Between was composed using the basic digital technique of counting, which allows for the quantitative analysis of literary texts.

(Source: Authors' abstract at Dear Navigator)

The Ed Report is a hypertextual US government document, describing the covert military exploits of a technical writer named Ed. (The coincidentally-named Ed Commission produced this once top-secret report.) Epic hero Ed leaves off his ordinary life - in which he writes software documentation, takes care of his autistic younger brother, and pursues early Near Eastern scholarship - as he is pressed into service as an Akkadian code-talker during an undercover operation in Colombia.

Of course, The Ed Report is also fiction, constructed collaboratively by Montfort, Gillespie, and Meissner. Written for the Web, it was revealed serially in the summer of 2000. It has also been read (in a press-conference sort of performance that borrowed from oral epic poetry traditions) in New York City, Chicago, and Bergen, Norway. The Ed Report exploits the novelty of the Web by presenting itself, in deadpan fashion, as a genuine text. On the Web, because of the gullibility of readers and the difficulty in verifying textual authenticity, parodies are frequently mistaken for reportage. The Ed Report was inspired, in part, by Orson Welles's radio play based on the H.G. Wells novel "War of the Worlds," which caused panic in America as listeners mistook it for an authentic news broadcast. It would be difficult to play such a splendid prank on the radio today - but the Web is a different story. Another influence was the Starr Report, which may have been, from the standpoint of the United States, the most important Web-original story yet published.

(Source: Author's submission statement To trAce Alt-X New Media Competition).

Author Statement:

The interactive and multimedia work Etang (Pond) is the result of a writing experience I have had with a friend. Just like my father, hers had died of a serious illness. For several weeks, we would meet and talk about our experience. Through short texts revolving around several themes, we would try to imagine each other’s experience. These texts have been published in the journal lieu-dit 19 and inspired a first animated, though not interactive, work on Mandelbrot’s website, which was since removed and destroyed by the authors. Some years after this experience in writing, I had the opportunity to take pictures in a burned-down house. On insurance grounds, the former inhabitants had had to leave all their belongings in the burned rooms. I decided to fill these rooms with the voice of my friend’s father who had died ten years before, as well as with his daughter’s voice and the healer’s. By interacting on manipulable elements, the reader moves from room to room in this soot-covered house; yet he/she never immerses him/herself in the scenery as would a video game avatar. The images clearly fulfil their role of photographs. Therefore, walking through this burned-down house does not amount to wandering in a 3D space, which every nook and cranny can be explored. The images are just reflections, vague memories, completely conditioned by the subjective eye of the photographer. They apply to a reality that changed a long time ago. The "voices" floating on these evanescent images are equally labile, i.e. constructed and deconstructed by fragile textual animations. Thus, the voice of the healer, the family’s last hope, asks the patient to "breathe," but instead of being animated via a systolic/diastolic movement, the text deconstructs itself and disappears in a last breath. The author's voice is sometimes superimposed on the animated text; in German, this voice tells her own experience of her father’s death, while never really tallying with the experience described by her friend in French. On the one hand, this work offers no way out, and the reader can wander endlessly to "meet" the voices; on the other hand, the location of the burned-down house does not really present itself to the reader, as is the case with the voices. Death, forgetfulness, the slow but sure decay of memories are both suggested on a "visual" level and denied by the circularity of the "wandering" experience. The digital work tries to preserve these memories, even if they are to fall inevitably into oblivion because of the instability of the device. The work invites the reader to become a party to this desperate attempt to prevent the stream of oblivion from leaking. Therefore, Etang (Pond) is located on the border between the aesthetics of the ephemeral, in which the author accepts the slow decay of his/her work, and the aesthetics of re-enchantment, in which the author ascribes the digital device with a hope of survival, with a spectral characteristic linked to the materiality of the programmed matter and which remains despite the changes it undergoes on the electronic device.

Talking Cure is an installation that includes live video processing, speech recognition, and a dynamically composed sound environment. It is about seeing, writing, and speaking — about word pictures, the gaze, and cure. It works with the story of Anna O, the patient of Joseph Breuer's who gave to him and Freud the concept of the "talking cure" as well as the word pictures to substantiate it. The reader enters a space with a projection surface at one end and a high-backed chair, facing it, at another. In front of the chair are a video camera and microphone. The video camera's image of the person in the chair is displayed, as text, on the screen. This "word picture" display is formed by reducing the live image to three colors, and then using these colors to determine the mixture between three color-coded layers of text. One of these layers is from Joseph Breuer's case study of Anna O. Another layer of text consists of the words "to torment" repeated — one of the few direct quotations attributed to Anna in the case study. The third layer of text, which becomes visible only when a person is in the chair, reworks Anna's snake hallucinations through the story of the Gorgon Medusa, reconfiguring the analytic gaze. Speaking into the microphone triggers a speech-to-text engine that replaces Anna's words with what it (mis)understands the participant to have said. What is said into the microphone is also recorded, and becomes part of a sound environment that includes recordings of Breuer's words, Anna's words, our words, and all that has been spoken over the length of the installation. Others in the space observe the person in the chair through word pictures on the screen. Readers move their bodies at first to create visual effects, and then to achieve textual ones, creating new reading experiences for themselves and others in the room. Movements range from slowly moving an extended arm in order to recreate left-to-right reading, to head or hand rotation seeking evocative neologisms at the mobile textual borders within the image. The video processing technique was created by Utterback, and has been exhibited separately as Written Forms. The sound environment was designed and implemented by Castiglia, and Nathan Wardrip-Fruin implemented the speech-to-text. Talking Cure was first presented at the 2002 Electronic Literature Organization symposium at UCLA. I have also presented it as a performance/reading, cycling verbally between the layers of text while my image is projected as a different textual mixture on a screen.

(Source: Author's website.)

Interested in the breaking and production of meanings, the non-semantic the visual, the oral, the blank page, the engagement of the reader/user in theshifting from the linguistic to the visual and back. To represent the broken and the formations of new meanings, I create an aesthetic environment consisting of a blank page/screen, inviting the reader/user to click/touch the screen in order to generate words. The installation includes a microphone to invite the users to read aloud and share with other users the experience of performing the work through their oral participation. As the user explores and experiences the work by connecting the random words appearing in the screen and assembling definitions, the accidental position of words produce new relationships, and in doing so, an on going process of meanings, connections and narratives; of shifting from the semantic linguistic meaning to the visual, from the literal, the transparent to the abstract; and simultaneously creating a poetic space of juxtaposed words, layers, and visual textualities.

The database of this work is a list of the 100 words all American high school graduates and their parents should know upon graduation.

(source: author's website.)

my Molly (departed), formerly titled Twittering, is a textual instrument designed as a performance application. The pieces remixes text, image, audio, and video triggered through keyboard interaction. The work has been performed at the OpenPort Performance Festival (Chicago), ePoetry 2007 (Paris), The Codework Workshop (West Virginia University), The Electronic Literature in Europe Conference (Bergen Norway), and the Interrupt Festival (Brown University).

The piece coexists with a novel (Free Dogma Press) that was written simultaneous to the development of this work. Where the novel plays on aspects of time, and draws from sources such as Joyce, Strindberg, Beckett, Dante, among others; the hypermedia textual instrument combines these in a more immediate, collapsed manner.

Programmatic or computational art is often, although not necessarily, related to art in other media: visual, performative, conceptual, and so on. The art systems of The Readers Project relate to writing and to reading, to our encounters with literary language. This project is an essay in language-driven digital art, in writing digital media. The Readers Project visualizes reading, although it does not do this in the sense of miming conventional human reading. Rather, the project explores and visualizes existing and alternative vectors of reading, vectors that are motivated by the properties and methods of language and language art.

Visualization, especially as a function of computation, is now quite commonplace in artistic practice, but it has little culture moment unless it provides critique, and it is not art unless it conveys an aesthetic. The Readers Project is a visualization of reading but it is implicitly critical of conventional reading habits. Further, because the project’s readers move within and are thus composed by the words within which they move, they also, effectively, write. They generate texts and the traces of their writings are offered to the project’s human readers as such, as writing, as literary art; published as real-time streams of live-writing, available to anyone with internet access.

Computationally-engaged text generation has a significant, if marginal, history in literary art practice. The Readers Project is innovative, however, in having found a number of ways to display the primary source of a text generator’s inputs within this source’s typographically structured literary environment. A less obvious but equally important aspect of the project is its use of current natural language information—especially concerning the relative frequencies of words and phrases considered by the readers—culled from the largest corpus of human language that has ever existed, a universe of language no longer deep within or distant from us, but now made visible to all by the free demons of web indexing and, more recently, by active cells of the Natural Language Liberation Front (http://nllf.net/).

(Source: Artists' Statement from the project site)