Judd Morrissey

This course explores language as something that moves, reacts, performs, and evolves - behaving more like a generative system than a static text. Students investigate how language transforms when it encounters computation, emerging technologies, and inventive modes of engagement and presentation.

Drawing on more than half a century of experimental forms - including computer poetry, hypertext fiction, digital poetry, text games, multimedia texts, algorithmic composition, and AI-driven systems - students create autonomous, interactive, and immersive language-based works guided by weekly workshops. Projects may take the form of interactive or playable texts, responsive performances or installations, generative compositions, or hybrid works that invite participation, agency, and emergence.

Designed for broad accessibility, the course is anchored in web-based tools including HTML/CSS/JavaScript, p5.js, Twine, A-Frame, and contemporary AI language models, with optional extensions into interactive fiction platforms, expanded reality (XR), physical computing, and live systems. The semester culminates in a public event of readings, interactions, and performances. No prior programming experience is required.

Professional Practice: Web Art is a course that combines creative and practical knowledge related to web site development. Launched in 1989 as a remote file sharing system for scientists, the World Wide Web is nearly thirty years old. Today, the web functions as an exhibition space, a communications hub as well as a nexus for creative expression. Students in the Web Art class will learn the Hypertext Mark-Up Language (HTML), which is the basis of WWW authoring. Potential overall format and conceptual frameworks for developing a media-rich web site will be investigated, and ways of subverting the traditional web page format in order to create unique approaches to the dynamics of the web will be explored. Course activities include technical tutorials, preparation of a CV, writing of a project statement, and the creation of a web site.

This seminar consists of weekly studio visits, discussions, and small group critiques. Students are expected to arrive with completed and semi-completed works and be prepared to make and re-make new works throughout the summer sessions. A wide variety of readings chosen by faculty will guide discussions that concentrate on problems concerning methods of artmaking, distribution, and interpretation. Readings will include examples drawn from the emerging category of conceptual writing as well as crucial art historical texts, literature, and poetry.

Over the course of each six-week summer residency period, all students in the Low- Res MFA program engage with a series of world renowned artists and scholars to expand our collective conceptual frameworks and discourses. Invited speakers participate in our Visiting Artist & Scholar Lecture Series. They deliver a public lecture open to the entire SAIC and Chicago community and the general public, and then participate in a Colloquium the next day exclusively for Low-Res MFA students. Each Colloquium takes place with the artist present, and is a space where the artist¿s work and concepts (direct or adjacent) are discussed, questions are raised, and topics are debated. Colloquium asks for consensus, but rather a dynamic and in depth discursive exploration of ideas. This form allows for a multiplicity of voices to build on concepts through questioning, contributing, challenging, and listening to each other. The colloquium is considered a Gift anchored with the presence of the visiting artist. This Gift is generated by enacting full attention to the concepts present in the artist or scholar¿s work. In the spirit of Lewis Hyde, the Gift is an exchange which generates or propagates further attention and exchange in culture. Thus, the Colloquium is a Gift meant to propagate further exchange in the world, as artists and citizens.

Taken every semester, the Graduate Projects courses allow students to focus in private sessions on the development of their work. Students register for 6 hours of Graduate Project credit in each semester of study.

Taken every semester, the Graduate Projects courses allow students to focus in private sessions on the development of their work. Students register for 6 hours of Graduate Project credit in each semester of study.

This course examines an artist?s professional practice tactically, within the context of a contemporary networked international art world in which online presence rivals real-world gallery and museums, and media documentation of works can be as significant as physical versions in their impact. In relation to these transformations, traditional museum curation has morphed into a hybrid practice - museumology - in which curators work in teams with education and media departments and museums consider ?community outreach? rather than archiving or connoisseurship their primary missions. The art world is, like most others, a shifting ground post ubiquitous media. Students will consider the Internet, the possibility of tactical virality and their own artistic identities in relation to such transformations through site visits and active discussion with members of the Chicago gallery and museum community. These will be augmented by online Skype meetings with organizers and art professionals outside of Chicago in both the national and international context.

Students in their final residency enroll in Thesis Studio: Public Presentation, a two-part course that guides students through their thesis presentation that will be given in the SAIC Galleries during the MFA Thesis Exhibition. The first portion functions as a seminar, during which students learn about historical modes and forms of the artist¿s talk and prepare for their own public presentations. These presentations consist of two parts: an artist talk to be delivered live in relation to the Thesis Exhibition, and a creative video work that synthesizes ideas in each artist¿s practice in a new way. The second portion of the course consists of presenting the talks and videos to the entire graduating cohort and SAIC faculty.