Forward Anywhere

Originally written under the auspices of the Xerox PARC Artist in Residence Program, and published in 1996  by Eastgate Systems, Forward Anywhere is a hypertextual narrative written by new media poet Judy Malloy and then Xerox PARC hypertext researcher Cathy Marshall. Created when Malloy was an artist in residence at PARC, beginning in 1993, the collaborative narrative -- an exchange of the details of the lives of two women who work with hypertext -- unfolded via email over a year or so and then was somewhat fictionalizd and recontextualized into Forward Anywhere.  "...each emerges from a particular history and sensibility, Malloy's from the postwar suburbs of Boston, Marshall's from California and the sixties. To pass from one of these moments to the other is to recognize the almost-repetition of emergent or autopoetic pattern, an experience that touches something very deep in the instinctual repertoire, perhaps demonstrating that software does speak to human identity after all," Stuart Moulthrop wrote in "Where to?", Convergence 3:3, Fall, 1997: 132-38. Forward Anywhere was also detailed in two papers: Judy Malloy and Cathy Marshall, "Notes on an Exchange Between Intersecting Lives", in: In Search of Innovation - the Xerox PARC PAIR Experiment, Craig Harris, ed., MIT PRESS, 2000 and Judy Malloy and Cathy Marshall, "Closure was Never a Goal in this Piece", in: Wired Women. Seal, 1996 ed.  Cherny and Weise.pp. 56-70. It was exhibited at Xerox PARC as part of PARC's 25th Anniversary Celebration in 1995 and at Artemisia Gallery in Chicago in 1996