Judd Morrissey
Photo by Kevin Penczak
Judd Morrissey is a writer and code artist who creates poetic systems across a range of platforms incorporating electronic writing, internet art, live performance, and augmented reality. His works have been widely studied by scholars of new media and digital literature. He is a recipient of awards including an Andy Warhol Foundation Arts Writers Grant, a Fulbright Scholar’s Award in Digital Culture, and a Mellon Foundation Collaborative Fellowship for Arts Practice and Scholarship. Judd is an Associate Professor in the Art and Technology / Sound Practices (AT/SP) department at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. He is the co-founder of the performance and technology collective Anatomical Theatres of Mixed Reality (ATOM-r) .
Judd’s solo and collaborative works have been included in a broad range of festivals, conferences and exhibitions at venues including the Art Institute of Chicago, Victoria and Albert Museum (London), Zero1 Garage (San Jose), Eyebeam (NYC), Le Cube (Paris), Anatomy Theater & Museum (London), Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, and House of World Cultures (Berlin). Reviews and interviews have appeared in publications including the New York Times, RAINTAXI, BOMB Magazine, and the Iowa Review.
Artist’s Statement
Why is the work that the New Frameworks project is working to preserve important to you?
The work, My Name is Captain, Captain, is a partial record of the mystery and mythology of an extended formative moment of otherworldly inspiration in my own life that also reflects emblematically upon the history of this world, born of a heightened moment in the evolving entanglement of technology and poetry, and abducted into a willfully blind fever dream of love and discovery. Having been published in the short-lived format of a cd, it was effectively taken out of circulation prematurely and received less attention than its companion work, The Jew’s Daughter. Its obsolescence is linked to my own life cycle, but in renewal and return, core desires of the work, it belongs more fully to itself.
What are the key ideas, issues, struggles, goals within your work?
In revisiting this older work, I am newly aware of the concern for memory at the core of my poetics, the desire to commemorate the wonder of life when it is experienced as a clarifying symbolic pattern, as “leaps in the night” to reference Helene Cixous, the making of memory as a series of unfolding epiphanies, beautiful abundances that mirror my most deeply lodged desires and illusions. In this work being preserved, the phrase negative culpability, a twist on Keats, contains a question at the core of poetic inquiry: How can I embrace unknowing while being accountable to my discoveries?
Who is your audience?
I will defer to Gertrude Stein and answer with all sincerity: myself and strangers.
Who are your biggest artistic influences?
Is hard to escape our initial historical mentors who we meet at our most formative educational moments. For me, some of the most clearly evident of these were James Joyce, Maurice Blanchot, and Rilke. At the same time, it has been above all my closest collaborators who continue to form my aesthetic identity within the contemporary: Goat Island, Lori Talley, Mark Jeffery, Ava Aviva Avnisan. And then there are the echoing voices of all of my teachers, and my students who continue to guide me through the tumultuous acceleration of cultural accountability and change.
Preservation Sketch
Read how we preserved Judd Morrissey’s work, My Name is Captain, Captain.