In 1986, Judy Malloy (b. 1942) invited members of the pre-Web, online arts platform Art Com Electronic Network (ACEN) to share fake information as part of her project Bad Information. She later organized this crowdsourced, fictive data into a database on ACEN. In this and related works, Malloy used information management techniques to critique a lack of nuance within cultural attitudes about technology in the 1980s, tying concerns about the perceived authority of computer-mediated knowledge to conceptual art’s preoccupation with information as the emergent form of cultural production. Drawing on archival material including correspondence from the Fred Truck Papers at the Archives of American Art, this essay analyses multiple versions of Bad Information. Malloy’s construction of a corpus of “bad information” grappled with the difficulties in distinguishing between true and false in a cultural context of accelerating information exchange and technological valorization, portending the current distribution of mis- and disinformation online.
Erin Dickey (Sun,) studied this question.