Judd Morrissey

Associate Professor and Chair, Art and Technology / Sound Practices

judisdaid.org

Judd Morrissey has been teaching at SAIC since 2002. He took his sabbatical during the AY2022–23.

Judd Morrissey’s project in the Faculty Sabbatical Triennial is a collaboration with Ava Aviva Avnisan (MFA, 2015).

Judd 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. 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. He is currently an Associate Professor & Chair of the Art and Technology / Sound Practices (AT/SP) department at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.

From 2006-2009, Judd worked with the seminal performance group, Goat Island. In 2012, he co-founded the collective Anatomical Theatres of Mixed Reality (ATOM-r) to explore 21st century embodiment through performance, poetics, and emerging technologies. The work of ATOM-r mixes the live body with ubiquitous computing through an implementation of Augmented Reality (AR) in which virtual content is overlaid onto bodies and spaces. ATOM-r was conceived in the image of early modern anatomical theatres, small amphitheaters built for viewing human autopsies and surgical procedures. The collective uses this architecture symbolically to explore the altered and technologically augmented body, to dissect queer histories, and reveal embodied personal narratives.

Judd’s solo and collaborative works have been included in a broad range of festivals, conferences and exhibitions at venues including the Victoria and Albert Museum (London), Chisenhale Dance Space (London), Venuše ve Švehlovce (Prague), Centro de Arte Contemporáneo (Buenos Aires), Zero1 Garage (San Jose), Eyebeam (NYC), Le Cube (Paris), Casa das Caldeiras (Coimbra), Anatomy Theater & Museum (London), Performing House (York), Center of Contemporary Culture Barcelona, Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, Landmark Kunsthalle (Bergen), House of World Cultures (Berlin), Teatre & TD (Zagreb), Gallery 400 (Chicago), and the Chicago Cultural Center. His work has been the subject of numerous critical studies and reviews have appeared in the New York Times, The New Republic, RAINTAXI, and the Iowa Review.

Ava Aviva Avnisan (she/they) is a multidisciplinary, research-based artist whose work is situated at the intersection of image, text and code. Using an array of emerging technologies including 3D scanning, augmented and virtual reality, and generative AI, Ava works across installation, performance, photography and film to create artworks that seek to subvert dominant narratives through embodied encounters with language.

Ava has presented her work both nationally and internationally. Selected exhibitions, biennials and performances include: solo shows at Pratt Institute, New York, NY (2024) and the Niels Bohr Institute in Copenhagen, Denmark (2016); Invisible Traditions at The FRONT Arte & Cultura in San Diego, CA, as part of San Diego-Tijuana World Design Capital 2024; Inside Practice at the Art Institute of Chicago in Chicago, IL (2020); Refiguring the Future at 205 Hudson Gallery in New York, NY (2019); Between Bodies at The Henry Art Gallery in Seattle, Washington (2018-19); and the Chicago Architecture Biennial (2017). She has been interviewed by BOMB Magazine and her work has been published in Engaging the Margins: Experimental Practices in Interdisciplinary Art (BRILL, 2024); Performance in a Pandemic (Routledge, 2022); INDEX Vol. 6: An Annual Document of Performance Practice (Ugly Duckling Presse, 2017), the Electronic Literature Collection, Volume 3 (2016), and others.

Ava holds an M.F.A. in Poetry from Brooklyn College and an M.F.A in Art and Technology Studies from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Ava is an Assistant Professor of Art and Design at San Diego State University with a co-appointment in the school of Journalism and Media Studies.

Education

MFA, Brown University, 2000
BA, Bard College, 1997

Notable Classes Taught:

Electronic Writing, since 2015
Poetic Systems, since 2017
Mixed Reality Performance, since 2018

More info:

AToMR's Vimeo
Ava Aviva Avnisan

Sabbatical Reflection

The Zone of Pure Doubt, or, How I Formulated a Certain Sabbatical
Judd Morrissey, August 2025

It has long been my practice to follow language. When I began to contemplate, after nearly 20 years of teaching at SAIC, the horizon of my first sabbatical in 2022-23, I noted the connections between the words sabbatical and sabbath, their shared etymological rooting in the enactment of a structured rest. Beginning with this pairing of words, I began to contemplate a poetics of rest, one that might enable me to put obsolete works and fading memories to rest, to make space, as I cross through the middle of life, for what is still to come, the rest of my body of work.

A sabbatical is clearly not an idle rest but an active one with expectations of professional enhancement, particularly in the present day with its emphasis on productivity over other temporalities. It occurred to me that rest is always entangled with the agitated shivers of its homophonic double, the word wrest. Does the past need to be wrested awake, once more wrestled with, in order to finally go away quietly?

Because the sabbath begins at sundown on Friday and ends the following nightfall, its clock is set not by the mechanical tick of hours but by the slow arc of the sun. Its arrival drifts with geography, sliding across latitudes and time zones. More curiously, I learned that its moment can be elusive—uncertain to the point of vanishing. This uncertainty springs from an ancient dispute over the halakhic dateline, the boundary in Jewish law that marks where a day turns. That invisible meridian does not align with the international dateline of global timekeeping. To reconcile the two, allowances are made: in Hawaii, for instance, one may keep the sabbath on Saturday in step with the local week. Yet beyond every rule lies a zone of pure doubt—a thin longitudinal swath of Pacific water and islands where the sabbath’s hour, the hour of rest, cannot be precisely found.

In researching the history of the dateline(s), I came across nautical line-crossing ceremonies that date back to at least the 16th century. These elaborate rites have often taken the form of violent hazing scenarios in which sailors undergo a symbolic metamorphosis from polywog to shellback as they cross the equator for the first time, hardening into a manhood presumably armored for colonial conquest.

But when we cross the line
It will bend us

Because our bodies are becoming softer

While I was pursuing this line of inquiry, my collaborator of a decade now, Ava Aviva Avnisan, in the early days of gender transition, had become preoccupied with Disney princesses and was learning to cover the song How Far I’ll Go from the animated film Moana on guitar. In the song, Moana famously sits on the water’s edge of a Polynesian Island, gazing out to where the light meets the sea, and asks: Will I cross that line?

For my year of wrest, I arranged an artist’s residency at the University of Auckland in New Zealand, where I stayed in a Signalman’s House, the former station of one who hoisted configurations of coded flags to direct ships in the harbor. I then traveled backwards in time for a second residency at the Center for Biographical Research in Honolulu. During this time, Ava Aviva and I met on the Big Island of Hawaii, where we circumnavigated the trans-temporal volcanic landscape and wrote poems and songs in dialogue with one another. We Lidar scanned ourselves in the primeval abundance of the rainforest surrounding our cottage, choreographing our bodies into a pose inspired by the painting Jacob Wrestles with the Angel (1855) by Paul Gustave Dore.

The work included in the Triennial, drawn from a larger body of writing and performance, The Zone of Pure Doubt, symbolically traces the course of our relationship and its evolving poetic vocabulary through the fascination and uncertainty of radical transformation. As the exhibition neared, we had the opportunity to work with a talented producer, Mario Ávalos, at Resonante Estudio in Mexico City, where we fleshed out two of our original acoustic songs into a debut musical release under the band name, Nobo’s Muse. In the installation, the two songs play in alternation on two turntables so that at any given time, one turntable plays a song while the other emits ambient bird recordings. The turntables are placed in relation to a 30 foot wallpaper panorama made from Lidar scan data, and a collaboratively interwoven text upon the floor that winds through the work in the shape of the international dateline.

In a time and place where academia is existentially threatened and administrative responsibilities can eclipse the essential commitments of an artistic practice, sabbatical is a more progressive and necessary institution than ever before, enabling unencumbered creative inquiry and art-life balance against the precarity of creative and intellectual vocations in America.

Special thanks to the many hosts and collaborators who helped materialize this installation and the larger body of work from which it comes: Lisa Samuels and Alys Longly at the University of Auckland; John Zuern at the University of Hawai’i at Manoa; and artistic collaborators on the music release: Mario Ávalos, Diego Mier, Pedro Ángel, Sarah Lutkenhaus, Eugene Tang, Kyle Dunn, Danielle Franco, and Saumitra Chandratreya.