The Last Performance is a Web-based, collaborative writing, archiving, and text-visualization project conceived in response to the work of the Chicago-based performance collective Goat Island and their decision, after more than twenty years of practice, to create a final performance. Based on the architecture of a Byzantine dome, the project is evolving over two years, alongside the creation and performance of Goat Island’s The Lastmaker. The structure of the Web-based work is taken from the company’s research into double buildings, a phrase used to describe spaces that have housed and survived multiple historical identities, with a specific concern for the functions of churches, mosques, and museums. The central structure of The Last Performance is a virtual dome, based on the cupola of a particular Croatian double building, a construction of circles within circles consisting of 4,680 glass lenses. These lenses have been translated into writing spaces that will be populated over two years, tracing the development of Goat Island’s final performance work and responding to its generative constraints and themes. The project consists of contributions from Judd Morrissey, Goat Island company members, invited critics and artists, and the public.Judd Morrissey’s Web and CD projects include The Jew’s Daughter, a hypertext novel in an interactive CD and Web archive, published by the Electronic Literature Organization Collection in 2006; and My Name Is Captain, Captain, an interactive CD-ROM hyper-elegy, released by Eastgate Systems in 2002. His work has been included in international festivals of electronic writing and digital art, including File, E-poetry, p0es1s, and Digital Arts & Culture, and his essays and artist’s pages have appeared in Frakcija and Performance Research. Morrissey is an Adjunct Assistant Professor at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in Writing, Art and Technology Studies, and Performance.
Judd Morrissey
2006 — New & Alternative media
The Last Performance