Judd Morrissey

Writing in the twenty-first century is computational, writes literary critic N. Katherine Hayles. While this is true, she explains, of any work that uses digital software as its production environment before being output to print, it is particularly evident in works of electronic literature that are designed to be encountered on the computer screen. The practitioner of electronic writing is an author who combines human language and computer code to create new kinds of literary experience. Works of electronic literature can exceed the possibilities of print in their scale, dynamic variability, visual and temporal qualities, and attentiveness to the reader. The environment of the network (internet) also provides new opportunities for collaboration and sampling of found material. In this writing studio, we will survey varied forms of electronic literature including interactive hypertext / hypermedia, multi-user environments, codeworks, e-poetry, writing for virtual reality, and text-driven digital performance. Students will engage the potential of computational literature by creating original works using a variety of web-based programming languages taught in the weekly sessions. No previous programming experience is required.

Gen Sem: Electronic Writing Writing in the twenty-first century is computational, writes literary critic N. Katherine Hayles. She explains that while this is true of any work that uses digital software as its production environment before being output to print, it is particularly evident in works of electronic literature that are designed to be encountered on the computer screen. The practitioner of electronic writing is an author who combines human language and computer code to create new kinds of literary experience. Works of electronic literature can exceed the possibilities of print in their scale, dynamic variability, visual and temporal qualities, and attentiveness to the reader. The environment of the network (internet) also provides new opportunities for collaboration and sampling of found material. In this writing studio, we will survey varied forms of electronic literature including interactive hypertext/hypermedia, multi-user environments, codeworks, e-poetry, writing for virtual reality, and text-driven digital performance. Students engage the potential of computational literature by creating original works using a variety of web-based programming languages taught in the weekly sessions. No previous programming experience is required.

What do we mean when we say that something is poetic? How would you describe the unique poetics at play within your own work? While contemplation about poetics can be traced back thousands of years, it has surged in the last half-century as artists and scholars attempt to account for the accelerated diversification of creative forms in a rapidly evolving technoculture. This course is a laboratory for experiments that embrace poetics as a way of thinking and making across disciplines. We will explore a selectively broad range of expanded and media-based poetic practices including constraint-based composition, hypertext, digital poetry, performance writing, virtual poetics, and bio-poetry as we discover and develop unique interdisciplinary projects. Open to a multiplicity of influences and outputs, text-centric or otherwise, the course is appropriate to artists with interests in language, semantics, code, and systems. No specific technical experience is required but the course is advanced in its expectation of a self-directed creative commitment and a significant contribution to group discourse in relation to the topic.

What do we mean when we say that something is poetic? How would you describe the unique poetics at play within your own work? While contemplation about poetics can be traced back thousands of years, it has surged in the last half-century as artists and scholars attempt to account for the accelerated diversification of creative forms in a rapidly evolving technoculture. This course is a laboratory for experiments that embrace poetics as a way of thinking and making across disciplines. We will explore a selectively broad range of expanded and media-based poetic practices including constraint-based composition, hypertext, digital poetry, performance writing, virtual poetics, and bio-poetry as we discover and develop unique interdisciplinary projects. Open to a multiplicity of influences and outputs, text-centric or otherwise, the course is appropriate to artists with interests in language, semantics, code, and systems. No specific technical experience is required but the course is advanced in its expectation of a self-directed creative commitment and a significant contribution to group discourse in relation to the topic.

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.