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 course reimagines poetic and text-based forms by fusing creative expression with digital and physical media. Students will engage in a laboratory of mediated practices-from DIY computational poetics and AI-generated texts to performance, installation, and digital embroidery-that challenge traditional boundaries between words, images, and materials. Drawing inspiration from the historical interplay between text and textiles, the course examines language as both a conceptual and visual phenomenon, exploring its semiotic potential across various sensory dimensions. Weekly workshops and brief readings introduce foundational concepts in creative coding and poetics, while ample time is dedicated to self-directed individual or collaborative projects. These projects encourage participants to synthesize course content with personal creative practice, fostering a dynamic exchange of ideas and innovative approaches. Although no prior technical background is required, students are expected to commit to a high level of creative inquiry and active participation in group discussions.

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.