Brown University Literary Arts Program presents Mark Jeffery and Judd Morrissey — a collaboration merging performance and digital literary practices :: March 13 - March 20, 2009 ::

They will present The Last Performance at Pembroke Hall, Room 305 on March 14 at 7pm. They will then take up a six-day residency at Firehouse 13 where they will initiate a new work. On March 15 at 7pm, there will be an opening event and artists’ talk, also at Firehouse 13, 41 Central Street, Providence, Rhode Island. A presentation of the work-in-progress will take place Firehouse 13, on March 20 at 9pm. Follow / Interrupt on Twitter (writings to begin appearing March 15)

Mark Jeffery (B. 1973 Doveridge, UK) Performance / Installation Artist was a member of Goat Island Performance Group from 1996 - 2009. He created and performed in 5 of Goat Island works and performed these works and taught extensively across North America, teaching 10 summer schools at the School of the Art institute of Chicago and Western and Eastern Europe including Glasgow, Bristol, Aberystwyth, Berlin, Zagreb and Prague. Goat Island completed touring its last performance work The Lastmaker in February 2009. Recent performances include Chapel Hill, NC, P.S 122 NYC, MCA Chicago, Eureka Zagreb and The House of World Cultures Berlin. The company presented their penultimate work ‘When Will the September Roses Bloom Last Night Was Only a Comedy’ at the Venice Biennale in 2005.

Mark received his BA (Hons) in Visual Performance from Dartington College of Arts UK. He was awarded a Junior Fellowship in Live Art between the University of the West of England and Arnolfini Live. He has made collaborative and non collaborative performance / installation works in numerous spaces and contexts including Interrupt Digital Arts (Brown University), Kunsthalle Museum, (Norway) Site Unseen (Chicago Cultural Centre), Nottdance (Nottingham), Taxi Gallery (Cambridge), National Review of Live Art (Glasgow), ICA (London), Arnolfini (Bristol), Firstsite (Colchester), Green Room (Manchester), and Chapter (Cardiff).

Jeffery curates performance events in Chicago including co - curating the International Performance, Sound and Language festival OPENPORT at Links Hall, The School of the Art Institute of Chicago (SAIC) and Chicago Cultural Center. In 2006 he co - founded Chicago Performance Network (CPN), a 20 member committee of local presenters, artists, educators and funders to help foster and sustain the Chicago Performance Community and also to curate a new performance series called IN>TIME that began in 2008. He is now working on the next IN>TIME for 2010. Mark is currently an Adjunct Associate Professor at SAIC where he teaches in the Performance Department, First year Program and advises in the offices of career development and admissions. This summer he begins a new collaborative teaching summer Performance Institute with Matthew Goulish and Lin Hixson titled Abandoned Practises - something out of the ordinary.

Judd Morrissey (US) is a writer and interdisciplinary code and text artist whose works of electronic literature, performance and installation have been widely and internationally presented. He is the author of experimental works for web and cd including “The Jew’s Daughter” (Electronic Literature Collection, 2006), “My Name is Captain, Captain” (Eastgate Systems, 2002), and “The Error Engine,” an in-progress experiment in writing and artificial intelligence. He is currently working in collaboration with Goat Island performance group on a collaborative writing, archiving, and text-visualization project, “The Last Performance [dot org],” for which he was a recipient of the inaugural Creative Capital / Andy Warhol Foundation Arts Writers’ Grant in 2006.

Judd is an Adjunct Assistant Professor at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in Writing, Art and Technology Studies, and Performance. He is a founding member of the interdisciplinary art- making and curatorial collective, OPENPORT, and an Associate Member of Goat Island performance group. He received his MFA from Brown University. His work has been included in symposiums, festivals, and exhibitions throughout the US and UK and in France, Brazil, Germany, Norway, Croatia, and the Czech Republic. His work has been reviewed in the New York Times, The New Republic, RAINTAXI, and The Iowa Review. Studies of his electronic writing have appeared in books and essays by Dave Ciccorico, Lori Emerson, N. Katherine Hayles, and Jessica Pressman among others.