Judd Morrissey

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 experimental studio explores the token-a small unit that carries outsized meaning. Throughout history, tokens have served as ritual offerings, markers of exchange from knotted Andean quipu cords to arcade tokens, and the elemental units of language: letters, words, bits of code. As figures, tokens may expand meaning or collapse it into the trivial. In contemporary AI, tokens are the building blocks through which machines generate text, images, and voice. Together we will approach the token as both material and metaphor, reshaping how language and symbols circulate in artistic practice.

Students will engage digital poetics in many forms: lettristic and visual compositions, interactive and algorithmic writing, and performances where language becomes embodied or extended through code. Tokens will be reimagined as digital embroidery, augmented reality overlays, and hybrid artifacts that straddle physical and virtual worlds, while also functioning as the generative units of such outputs across media.

Weekly workshops introduce concepts in creative coding, media theory, AI, and generative poetics in ways accessible to all backgrounds, while ample time is devoted to experimentation, risk-taking, and collaboration on self-devised projects. No prior technical experience is required, but students should be prepared to assert creative agency, draw upon their unique skills and backgrounds, and contribute to a collaborative, exploratory classroom environment.

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.