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.

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.