The multi-media collaborating artists Mark Jeffery and Judd Morrissey have created the first artwork featuring five intercommunicating websites into one large-scale projected digital public art work, The Precession. Inspired by history, astronomy and new media sources, The Precession combines digital images, text and performance art into a monumental exploration of labor and the night sky. The concept for the artwork was developed after the artists visited the Hoover Dam and saw the Oskar J.W. Hansen sculpture, The Winged Figures of the Republic and the celestial floor map that is a part of the public art installation made in the 1930s. The Precession is comprised of three elements; a time-based digital projection on the Art Center’s panoramic 10 projector façade, a floor installation by Claire Ashley on the catwalk and live performances happening throughout the exhibition. Content for the projection streams from a custom built website combining local Twitter feeds, original and borrowed texts and blue-screened video of vocal and movement-based performances. Similar to the movement of the stars, details of the projection will vary slightly with each viewing. The artwork is laced with a multitude of historical and contemporary allusions including the choreography of Busby Berkley, The Grapes of Wrath, Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s New Deal and the geometric designs of contemporary artist Sol LeWitt. These seemingly cacophonous elements flow together representing the interrelationships between architecture, dreams, sustainability and futurity.
About Judd Morrissey and Mark Jeffery
Judd Morrissey and Mark Jeffery are Chicago-based artists merging digital literary practices and performance. The art work they create together is visual, textual and choreographic and evolves through context-specific research and practice. Morrissey and Jeffery always consider the constraints of a given venue or occasion when making a work. Site- responsive considerations include the performance/exhibition/production space as well as the local community and [online] textual activity happening within the locale (such as Twitter). A given piece is a body of material that may have no singular fixed form but is alternately or simultaneously presented as internet art, durational live installation or a performance of fixed length. Our work attempts to engage the flux of contemporary, networked culture and to contain a complex diversity of material within rigorously defined forms and structures. We are interested in a variety of contexts, instances, and interruptions for the work to evolve and be staged as it moves towards something like completion across multiple platforms. With a background rooted within writing, Judd Morrissey uses computer code to remix, visualize, and animate his texts on the web while also collecting data from online sources. Mark Jeffery generates movement and constructs images activating the body and installed objects in response to source material such as a memory, a site, or a sampled text or image. In the collision of these individual practices, physical and virtual sites and audiences are of equal importance
