The Precession: 2009-2012

The Precession is a data-driven poetic system realized variously and simultaneously as a web site, a large-scale multi-screen installation, and a live performance. The work makes use of original writing, real-time data collection, generative text processes, and embodied choreographies to create a complex cohension of diverse inquiries into architecture, labor and the night sky.

The project began with a site-based study of the Hoover Dam and a complex celestial map and sculpture of winged men permanently installed on the grounds to memorialize those who died during the dam's construction as a public work's project during the New Deal. Beginning with the date of the dam's dedication, the star map contains the data for someone skilled in astronomy to accurately trace the position of the polestar each subsequent night for the next 26,000 years.

The Precession was a two-year project developed as a series of iterations and seemingly autonomous exhibition and performance components responding to the poetics of labor and merging the symbolism of the night sky with live astronomical data. Variations and integral components of this project included theprecession.org, The Living Newspapers, and The Labo(u)rs. The project was ultimately realized as The Precession: An 80 Foot Long Internet Art Performance Poem, a 10-screen building facade projection comprised of web browsers intercommunicating to create panoramic content. The installation, which played alternately to the indoor gallery and the outdoor space was activated by performance events on the winter solstice and spring equinox.

The Precession: An 80 Foot Long Internet Art Performance Poem was a collaboration of Judd Morrissey & Mark Jeffery partially funded by a grant from the Illinois Arts Council, a state agency.