[ISEA97] Artist Statement: Judy Malloy – The Roar of Destiny Emanated From The Refrigerator

Artist Statement

Simulating mental breakdown with an interface that dissolves and reassembles, The Roar of Destiny. . . combines “flooding” of memory flashbacks with a heightened awareness of background noises and an inappropriate intertwining of significant and insignificant life details. The primary structural device is a dissolving and reassembling interface that was derived from my experiences of mental breakdown caused by post traumatic stress syndrome. It is a “frozen interface” composed of relevant words that sometimes runs rigidly, under control down the sides and across the bottom of the primary text and sometimes fragments or is merged with the primary text. Three primary strains run through the work—a series of flashbacks to the home of a modernist sculptor somewhere in Arizona; the cabin on the south side of the Colorado males that is the narrator’s home at the time of the telling of the story; and a series of jumbled disordered flashbacks to nonlucid periods that at intervals seize the narrator’s mind. These flashbacks are characterized by a black”background’; by schizophrenic language breakdown, and by an appropriately hypertextual paranoia. Integrating visual components, The Roar of Destiny. . . represents these strains (that diverge, combine, diverge) using a combination of color and screen design shifts. The reader, like the narrator, is involved in a continual interior struggle between “normal” and “abnormal” thoughts, between the “real” and the “virtual between the murky, stark black backgrounded paths and the bluegreen backgrounded paths beside clear mountain streams. Begun in December, 1995 this work (like the narrator’s distorted memories) is in flux. In the past year, new screens have slowly been added and, with every addition, the links on other screens have changed so that a reader returning to the work may find the paths by which he or she previously navigated the work to have disappeared, been diverted and/or augmented. people.well.com/user/jmalloy/roarofdestiny

  • Judy Malloy (U.S.A.) My work began with experimental artists books, with word works and related performances and installations. Since 1986, I’ve been making art with words on the Internet—a changeable, fluid, strange and wonderful virtual space. For over ten years, I have worked and made art online many ways — sometimes speaking solo, sometimes blending my voice with others, sometimes enhancing the virtual environment by building virtual structures, or recording/ installing the work of others. I am interested in integrating the inter-net into our lives — not primarily as an escape route or an alternate world but rather as an enriching, collectively experienced, communication-based culture. I’m currently Content Coordinator for Arts Wire and I edit Arts Wire Current, a weekly e-zine on social, economic, philosophical, and political issues affecting the arts. I’m also co-editing (with Pat Bentson) a book for Leonardo about women, art, and technology, and I’m an artist-in-residence at Xerox PARC.