November 6, 2023

Brynna Hosszu asks Judy Malloy about her process in writing its name was Penelope, the origins and influences that had an effect on the story, and how other artists of the time helped to shape her work.

Brynna Hosszu (BH): Could you tell me about the AIDS epidemic? How was it different from Covid?

Judy Malloy (JM): Particularly in big cities such as San Francisco, New York City and Los Angeles, AIDS took a generation of artists. As Steven Winn wrote 25 years later in the San Francisco Chronicle:

"They were tenors and trumpeters, playwrights and dancers, novelists and record producers, actors and printmakers. The roster of Bay Area artists who have died from AIDS over the past 25 years carries a poignant double message. It reminds us of all the light these men and women brought and how much more they had to give when the shadow fell. Death came, in most cases, when these artists were just reaching their prime. Much of their best work lay ahead." 

Approximately 7 million people died of COVID, but approximately 40 million died of AIDS. COVID was life interfering for many, but there was no cure for AIDS when Penelope was written. In my notes at https://people.well.com/user/jmalloy/statement.html I wrote:

"...Weeping together, the souls of warriors killed in the prime of life thronged to that place from every side..."

The work is set in the Northern California art world of the 1980's. The section titled "A Gathering of Spirits" references Book XI of The Odyssey where Odysseus enters the dwelling of the dead, and it alludes to the San Francisco Bay Area art world of the 1980's, a darker world in that time with the constant AIDS-dying of friends and fellow artists."

BH: Could you tell me about the zeitgeist of the time that you wrote it?

JM: It was a time when -- in art spaces throughout the San Francisco Bay Area -- performance art, video art, conceptual photography, installation, artists books, and increasingly information art and the electronic arts were an important part of the rich environment of the art world. 

Between 1980 and 1988, experimental artists books -- which were at the core of my work until I began writing electronic literature -- were a part of an international zeitgeist. More widely than the work of the heroine in Penelope, my work was included in artist books exhibitions including at:

The Berkeley Art Center; the University of Arizona Museum of Art; the University of New Mexico Museum of Art; the Walker Art Center; the XVI Biennial de Sao Paulo, Sao Paulo, Brazil; the Moore College of Art & Art & Design, Philadelphia; the Heller Gallery, University of California at Berkeley; the National Library of Madrid; Public Image, NYC; the Texas Women's University; the Cleveland Institute of Art, Cleveland; the Franklin Furnace, NYC; the Allen Street Gallery. Dallas, TX; the National Society for Photographic Education Conference, Minneapolis, MN; Works, San Jose; the Irvine Fine Arts Center, CA; SOMAR Gallery Space, San Francisco, CA; Images du Futur '87, Montreal;  Ars Electronica, Linz, Austria; New York University; Carnegie Melon University; Pittsburgh; Sao Paulo Municipal Gallery, Sao Paulo, Brazil.  

These exhibitions were mainly artists books or artist book-based installations and -- much like the Electronic Literature Organization today -- there was an International community of makers of artists books. This was important in creating a base for my early work in electronic literature, especially for Penelope.

See the last page of my CV at https://people.well.com/user/jmalloy/Judy_Malloy_CV.pdf for details of the exhibitions listed above that are not included under specific works of electronic literature.

BH: How much of this was based off of your own experiences? I know you included some experiences from your childhood. Is this more of a fiction or was this a way of experiencing and expressing your life?

JM: Although some of the memories are fictionalized, and certain aspects of my life are not included, almost all of its name was Penelope is based on my memories of real events. Below are some specific examples.

The childhood memories are what I remembered from living with my grandparents while my Father was a soldier on the European front during World Warr II.

Most of the artists and artworks described are real.

"For instance, the artist’s furniture described in various places was based on a series of chairs painted by Sas Colby. The nude man in the white cubicle is Paul Cotton, performing his sculpture Naked Came I, I think at SFMOMA in the old location; The computer printouts were made by Sonya Rapoport. Carolee Schneeman's work that I saw in her studio in New York City is the subject of a lexia; as is the photo of Jill Scott on a horse, that I saw in her studio at SITE in San Francisco. I think it was at an opening at SFAI that Chris Burden took off his shirt and showed us his scars.”

From https://people.well.com/user/jmalloy/statement.html

Here are a few that I have not identified before.

"A woman artist in her fifties stood against the wall,

slim in tight black pants" is Lutz Bacher

See https://news.artnet.com/art-world/lutz-bacher-obituary-1548001

"He wore a yellow and black checked shirt" is Michael Peppe

See https://www.artforum.com/events/michael-peppe-226899/

The weaver is Emily DuBois 

See https://www.emilydubois-art.com/bio

The man in the "white sweatshirt with Mickey Mouse in vivid colors centered on the front" is Art Com Electronic Network sysop, Fred Truck

"a slide projector was projecting images on the landing wall" is 

a party at Jo Hanson's house 

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jo_Hanson

However, although the men in Penelope were partially based on real boyfriends -- to preserve privacy -- they are fictionalized.  But it might be of interest to know that for two years my boyfriend was an artist with a film degree from the San Francisco Art Institute. The only job he could find was as a projectionist in a San Francisco porno theater. This job had been passed from filmmaker to filmmaker, some well-known, but since this is not noted in their wiki bios, I’m not comfortable in mentioning names.

BH: I liked the randomization and generative aspects, and how you created the content for that generation. I liked experiencing the characters' experience as memory flashbacks. What was your intention in using generative and randomization?

JM: Memory is not sequential. Memories come and go, triggered seemingly randomly by time, place, people, etc. Although this is not common in generative literature, I allowed repetition because memories play over and over again in our minds. 

These aspects of memory are what I sought to simulate in its name was Penelope. My intention was to write a work of literature in which the whole of the work unfolded the way our lives unfold in our memories. To a certain extent classic hypertext does this with explicit links, but the environment that generative hypertext creates in its name was Penelope is more intuitive.

BH: What was your thought through process in developing these elements? Did you start with a set or a particular plot line?

JM: I based the structure of its name was Penelope on the structure of Homer's Odyssey but instead of focusing on Odysseus, the male hero, I focused on his wife Penelope, who at home was waiting for his return from war -- and holding off unwelcome suitors by weaving an always unfinished work. 

From the notes to the Eastgate version:

"The six files (or parts) of its name was Penelope, Dawn; A Gathering of Shades; That Far-off Island; Fine Work and Wide Across; Rock and a Hard Place and Song are loosely based on books from the Odyssey.  The reader chooses which file to read and can move at will between the six files.  Within each file (with the exception of the sequential Song), the reader is given, at the will of the computer’s pseudo-random number generator (the thread that fate spins), a series of individual screens each, like a photo in a photo album, representing a picture from Anne’s memory so that the work is like a pack of small paintings or photographs that the computer continually shuffles.  The reader of its name was Penelope is invited to see things as Anne sees them, to observe her memories come and go in a natural, non-sequential manner.  And the combination of reader choice and the constantly changing order (like the raveling and unraveling of Penelope’s web) makes it highly unlikely that the same experience of the story will ever appear twice.”

BH: Could you describe the circumstances when you were writing it? For example, were you still an artist in residence at Xerox Parc? Did you have a technological purpose like using a particular code or beta testing a software?

JM: The code I wrote for its name was Penelope began with the code I wrote for "Terminals", the third file of Uncle Roger.  

In "Terminals", I wanted to create an authoring system that would convey the changing, unsettled experience of the narrator's life. To do this, in the code I utilized a random number generator (technically a pseudo-random number generator) so that the narrator's memories came and went in the way that they do in real life.  

Background:

In the late 1960's I had been asked to program a database for the technical library of a NASA contractor. I began by taking FORTRAN in company classes for engineers, but it wasn't until I took a graduate summer course in Library Systems Analysis (at the University of Denver) that I learned how to create code for specific situations.  

There were no aps in those days, so I had to learn how to work like a software engineer, and in the process I learned how to harness code for my own ends. There is a difference between understanding the languages of code and creating code-based systems. 

I didn't go to PARC until four years later and when I did it was not primarily for my ability to write code. It was because of my ability to create innovative software systems.  

Specific answer:

at the time when I wrote its name was Penelope I lived in Berkeley. I was a single parent who worked three jobs -- not counting my work as a parent and my work as an artist. When I began to write electronic literature, I felt like I was moving into a different era of my life -- like the boat that moves across the screen in the original version of its name was Penelope.

BH: In general, what was your writing experience? How did you manage with the tools at hand?

JM: 1. Sometimes a small liberal arts college creates learning environments that are flexible enough so that literature comes alive. At Middlebury College in the hills of Vermont, English Literature and American Literature courses and art courses -- both art history and studio -- were important -- as was Greek literature as taught by Professor Harris.  

2. When I lived in Colorado, I took an extension course in writing children’s literature at the University of Colorado in Boulder. I was interested in combining words and images in my work and this combination pervaded children's literature.  Although eventually I did not approach character development and narrative development in the way it was taught, this course was often in the background when I broke archaic rules.  It wasn’t that I was driven to break rules, it was more that they didn’t work for my vision. Also, there is rhythm in writing for children that stayed with me, and surprisingly I did have a children's book published by EP Dutton. 

3. A turning point in my artwork was when I moved to the San Francisco Bay Area and saw artists book exhibitions. Finally, I understood how I could combine words and images in a way that fulfilled my vision. 

BH: How did you shape the story based on the technology?

JM: The technology was a flexible authoring system that I wrote in tandem with 

_revisiting the Odyssey -- which my Father read to me after he returned from the war. 

_envisioning the structure based on the Odyssey. 

_writing the lexias.

_and all the time revising the code until the whole worked according to my vision.

Note that here I am talking about the original version (that I wrote in BASIC) and the recent contemporary web version that I wrote in HTML/CSS/JavaScript to closely reproduce the original version.  

However, when Mark Bernstein published its name was Penelope, he gave it a StorySpace look and feel. This made sense in the context of his publishing vision. He used my algorithms for the structure. Other than the look and feel, a major change he made is that he thought the repetition should be limited, and we agreed to limit the repetition in the Eastgate version to no more than three times.