Conducted over email in January and February 2026, this conversation brings together media art curator and writer Shauna Jean Doherty with pioneering digital artist Judy Malloy at a moment of renewed attention to early networked art. Malloy, an American poet and visual artist whose work has long explored hypertext, database narrative, and online collaboration, was among the first to create interactive literary projects on networked systems, including her landmark work Making Art Online, initiated in 1991. Developed as a collectively authored, database-driven document of artists’ experiences with telecommunications, the project stands as a foundational experiment in what would become internet art and electronic literature.
Presented alongside the restoration of Making Art Online, this interview reflects on the origins of networked artistic practice, the challenges of early online collaboration, and the ongoing relevance of Malloy’s work to contemporary digital culture.
___SJD: At the time of creating Making Art Online were there any other, similar online projects that you were inspired by?
JM: Inspiration came earlier in circa 1978-1980 when Bill Bartlett hosted a series of online events — sometimes working with I.P.Sharp’s ARTEX, sometimes with slow scan. A primary subject of these events was using online communication technologies to discuss the impact of these technologies themselves on artists and the arts. At different times, different nodes participated, including, among others, Vancouver, San Francisco, Edmonton, New York, Toronto, and Vienna. Because my information source was La Mamelle/Art Com, the inspirational event for me was the Artists Use of Telecommunications conference directed by Bill Barlett and hosted by La Mamelle and The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. It was this event that was on my mind when I started creating Making Art Online.
Although I had created or been involved in other collaborative projects, I was not aware of a contemporary project that used the technology itself to document the now more public artists’ use of telecommunications. And I thought it was important to do this.
___SJD: Can you describe the energy that surrounded early online platforms like ANIMA, Usenet, and the WELL?
JM: As if our computers were dreamed of magic carpets. connecting directly with other artists from around the world — many of whom were doing pioneering work in the digital arts — early online platforms were amazing!
At this time, working creatively in digital environments was an adventure that we were thrilled to share — an innovative communications and authoring systems treasure hunt to which we all contributed.
Additionally, the idea of online collaboration not only with artists but also with different communities was entrancing. For example, on Art Com Electronic Network (ACEN) on The Well, in 1986 I invited users throughout The WELL to contribute “Bad Information” to a database that would demonstrate that computer-mediated information was not necessarily true. I was amazed that I received over 400 entries!
Exhibitions that emerged from early online platforms also contributed to the energy created by shared information. For instance, via Fortner Anderson whom I met on ACEN, I was invited to share my work at Ultimatum II, Images du Futur ’87 in Montreal. And from 1988-1989, ACEN created a traveling exhibition of artists software that began at Tisch School of the Arts, at New York University in 1988 and also traveled to San Jose State University, the University of; Colorado, Carnegie Melon University, and the 1989 ARS Electronica Festival. The exhibition included artworks published online on ACEN on THE WELL, such as John Cage: The First Meeting of the Satie Society; Judy Malloy: Uncle Roger; and Ian Ferrier und Fortner Anderson: The Heart of the Machine.
__SJD: Making Art Online relies on collective authorship. Does collaboration continue to play a role in your practice?
JM; The last major collaborative narrative that I produced was “name of scibe”, which was written online in 1994 by artists on The WELL in conjunction with artists on Arts Wire and is still available at:
https://people.well.com/user/jmalloy/scibe/story.html
This work was created on pre-Web conferencing systems but was eventually published on the Web. Indeed, my own history reflects larger histories at the time when the Web widely altered the online environment. As ACEN began to fade, in 1993, I started the Arts Conference on The WELL. And Arts Wire, where I began working in 1993, was also a hospitable environment for collaboration. At about this time, somewhere Derek Dowden saw Making Art Online and invited me to contribute it to the in-development ANIMA site, which became the first or one of the first web-based artist created platforms. I remember being impressed with how much information and work was available on the web-based ANIMA site.
But at Arts Wire, we were deeply involved in developing own move to the Web and that absorbed much of my energy. And more and more, personally I was immersed in creating electronic literature authoring systems and writing electronic literature – as well as in teaching students how to use social media creatively.
Thus, although personally I was no longer deeply involved in collaborative work — or perhaps Arts Wire as a whole was now my collaborative work — I continued to want to inspire artists to create on Social Media platforms. Echoing Bill Bartlett, I became what Arts Wire Director Joe Matuzak called a contemporary “circuit rider” teaching courses on creating social media-based art and narrative including collaborative works, first at The Deep Creek School in Telluride, then at The San Francisco Art Institute, Princeton University, the Rutgers Camden Digital Studies Center, and since 2018 at the School of The Art Institute of Chicago where, I and my students also hosted a series of collaborative conferences. or example see “The Contemporary Social Media Environment” at:
https://www.narrabase.net/saic_2021/panel21_documentation.pdf
__SJD: What technical limitations (and affordances) did you encounter during Making Art Online?
JM: I began using HTML when Arts Wire moved to The Web. Perhaps because HTML was much easier than the FORTRAN and then BASIC that I already knew (FORTRAN from working for an aerospace company and BASIC from creating early electronic literature), and because HTML itself was essentially hypertext, it worked effortlessly to create hypertext, and for me it was not a limitation; it was a new source of energy!
___SJD: Because Making Art Online evolved over time and generated different texts from the same database, what should viewers consider the ‘work’ or the ‘final work’?
JM: Researchers like to look at earlier versions of art and literature, but for me a work is often finished when I finish working on it, and it is published or exhibited in that way. Thus, the version published on ANIMA is de facto the final work because it was the first published iteration of what became the whole. The emulation from ANIMA that Steve Dietz published on the Walker site was included in the exhibition he curated: “Telematic Connections: The Virtual Embrace”, Walter & McBean Galleries, San Francisco Art Institute, February 2001, but that was essentially exhibition of a finished and already published work. I think that a call for more personal histories may have been retained, but no more information was received. An entire history of where Making Art Online was exhibited or published is available at:
https://people.well.com/user/jmalloy/makingart.html
However, it should be noted that “finished” is a slippery concept for web-based work. As your question validly points out, different versions could have been generated from the database; this happens a lot in generative literature, and currently for generative literature I usually ask the system to print a date and time when a new version is generated.
Note that generating output that suits my vision can – when the output incorporates machine-chosen random elements — be very time consuming because I cannot control the results, but Making Art Online was more of an important history than a work to play with, and I did not implement random output in Making Art Online. Instead, new entries were assigned a category keyword and then when new entries arrived, I printed out the whole in a pre-determined category-sequential order.
___SJD: Many contributors to Making Art Online mention collaboration, virtual community, and political engagement. How do you see the project documenting the social imaginaries of early networked technology?
JM: Collaboration, virtual community, and political or social engagement are core strengths of the contributions to Making Art Online. As is often the case with open collaborative works, I wanted more responses than I received. But I did not try to influence the content, and I did not select the artists who responded. Although this work is only a sample of the artists working in that era, surprisingly Making Art Online does document “the social imaginaries of early networked technology.” Perhaps this is because at that time many artists came from a place of collaboration, virtual community, and political or social engagement.
___SJD: As a woman working at the intersection of art and early networked technologies, how did your position influence the project’s formation and reception?
JM: That my work as a network artist was known — and that my work as a writer and editor was known to be open – were helpful in attracting participation and subsequent interest. And, along the way, it was important to me to include women.
It was always helpful to have the skills to format and code networked content. Contingently. it never felt to me as an artist and writer that I was lucky to have to continually work at jobs outside my creative practice, but admittedly it probably was. Years ago, I and my then husband were camping in the mountains of Colorado when we ran out of money. I picked up a local newspaper and saw an advertisement for a job in an aerospace company…
___SJD: Art history has traditionally privileged material objects. What challenges has Making Art Online posed for institutions engaged in archiving, collecting, and exhibiting it?
JM: As the history of this work indicates, it ran at The Reflux Project, at the 21st Biennial of Sao Paulo in 1991; was published in the online FineArt in November 1, 1991(when I was Managing Editor for Leonardo’s online publications); it was first implemented as a website by the Center for Image and Sound Research, (CSIR) Vancouver, B.C. on the ANIMA website; and the historic ANIMA version was included in the traveling exhibition Telematic Connections: The Virtual Embrace, 2001 curated by Steve Dietz and also hosted online by the Walker Center. Documentation of Making Art Online is available in the Judy Malloy Papers at the David M. Rubenstein Rare Book & Manuscript Library at Duke University. I keep a backup on my website hosted on The WELL, but currently It has disappeared from The Walker’s website.
Nevertheless, online work is potentially fleeting. If you publish a book in print, it will remain on library shelves or at the very least, it will show up in family bookshelves or even in yard sales. If computer-mediated works show up in yard sales, they are probably on no longer readable disks.
___SJD: Looking back now, how do you think Making Art Online helps us understand the transition from pre-web network cultures to today’s platform-based digital environments?
JM: Because it was a work by artists and for artists, many contributors talked about the work they themselves were creating on these new systems. Therefore, it is likely that Making Art Online played a role in fostering online creativity and associated community in the rapidly growing World Wide Web environment. And, even now for young artists coming online “seeing ” voices from the era when just going online was an adventure contributes to an understanding of what was possible and what could be possible.
Speaking to my students at the School of the Art Institute in Chicago, Marisa Parham, Director of African American History, Culture and Digital Humanities at the University of Maryland pointed to issues of of privacy and surveillance on contemporary social media, but she also said “For so many people, social media has amplified a sense of daily living as an art, which also opens an exciting entry point into engaging ‘regular people’ with working artists. There is so much joy, revolution, and possibility in this, yet yet yet…”