Judy Malloy has been working with information art and experimental book forms since 1977. Her work has been shown and published internationally.

When and how did your association with fAf begin?
It is a reflection of … the rapid platform changes over the last 10 years, that the files that remind me of the nature of my early involvement with fineArt forum (fAf) are stored in boxes on Apple II floppies.

I was assistant editor, F.A.S.T., fAf (1988-1989); coordinating editor, F.A.S.T., fAf between 1988 and 1990, before becoming associate editor of Leonardo Electronic News (LEN) until 1993.

What were your responsibilities and achievements there?
Part of my job as coordinating editor of fAf and F.A.S.T (Fine Art Science and Technology - a bulletin board ISAST briefly operated on the WELL) was to coordinate the diverse responsibilities and points of view of Ray Lauzanna who started FAF, Roger Malina who took it under the ISAST wing in 1988 and Carl Loeffler and Fred Truck and Anna Couey who were providing space for F.A.S.T. on Art Com Electronic Network (ACEN) on the WELL. *That I remember well.*

In those days, there was not the plethora of electronic publications that now exist. I think we all deserve credit for the fact that art publications were some of the first consistently produced ezines.

Roger Malina, who is skilled at gathering diverse talent together in productive, if occasionally, uneasy mixes, had found me through a paper I wrote for Leonardo on a series of information art projects – “OK Genetic Engineering” and in particular “Bad Information”, a collaborative art work that I began on ACEN on the WELL in 1986. Through producing “Bad Information” and later that same year, “Uncle Roger”, an online hyperfiction, I had acquired the necessary electronic publishing skills.

In those days everyone had to be a Jack of all trades. My responsibilities ranged from negotiation to UNIX hacking to content production. Late at night I might have been tinkering with the UNIX shell scripts that distributed FAF, arguing with Roger or Ray by email or surfing USENET (The web has made this so much easier) for artists who might be interested in writing about their work for “Words on Works”.

“Words on Works” (WOW) is the section I developed (originally for fAf, then WOW passed into (LEN) when fAf split into LEN and fAf in 1993. WOW was based on the excellent Leonardo idea that artists are the ones who can best write about their own works.

In this electronic medium, WOW made information about art works immediately available. The format was geared to electronic publication -- short and informal. I asked contributors to write about recent works in their own words, in any way that they wanted.

WOW statements ranged from Mary Jean Kenton's environmentally-based installation on the grounds of her farm in Pennsylvania, to New Yorker Hazen Reed's interactive documentary “Portraits of people living with AIDS”, to California media artist Lynn Hershman's “The Electronic Diary”, to Australian Jill Scott's interactive installation “Paradise Tossed”, to the collaborative audiovisual works of Belgian artists Maria Blondel and Guy De Bievre.

On one side of me, as I write these words, I have some information about my financial situation that is destined for a finance company. On my other side is a substantial pile of printouts of old issues of fAf and LEN that contain WORDS ON WORKS as well as the records of correspondence with many fellow artists about their work.

I do not think the finance company will be impressed by my long record of helping artists get out information about their work. But I am happy to have been working, both as an artist and with artists, for 10 years in this continuously wonderful electronic medium.

Biography
Judy Malloy has been working online since 1986 when she produced "Bad Information", a satire on the importance of computer mediated information in our society, and "Uncle Roger", a hyperfiction about Silicon Valley. Her hypernarratives, published by Eastgate Systems, have been widely reviewed and are taught in many university classes. They include "Its name was Penelope", "Forward Anywhere" (with Cathy Marshall) and "Love0ne". Her recently completed hyperfiction "The Roar of Destiny Emanated >From the Refrigerator" was featured in the Boston CyberArts Festival and on the National Endowment for the Arts website.

She was the coordinating editor of "fineArt forum" and "Leonardo Electronic News"; the founder of the ARTS Conference on the WELL, and co-founder of the Interactive Arts Conference on Arts Wire. Malloy was the first artist in residence at Xerox PARC.

She is the network coordinator for Arts Wire [http://www.artswire.org] and the editor of "Arts Wire Current". She is also a Leonardo International co-editor and the editor of "Women in New Media" (forthcoming from MIT Press).