David B. Smith Gallery

Joel Swanson is an artist, designer and writer who serves as the Director of the Technology, Arts & Media Program at the University of Colorado, Boulder. He teaches classes on digital art, media theory, and the history of design. He received his Masters of Fine Art at the University of California, San Diego with a specialty in Computing and the Arts.

Linguistic and literary theory inform his work, which ranges from digital art to sculpture to interactive installation. Thematically his work explores the technologies of language, their materialities, and their modes of signification. Specifically, he revisits the questions posed by the Conceptual language artists of the 1960’s and 1970’s, but in light of contemporary digital technologies. He is particularly drawn to the complexities, glitches and quirks within linguistic systems and within his work he focuses on those spaces where language breaks down.

His artwork has been exhibited nationally and internationally including a recent solo show at the Museum of Contemporary Art Denver, The Eli and Edythe Broad Museum, The Power Plant Contemporary Art Gallery of Toronto, the North Miami Museum of Contemporary Art and the Orange Country Museum of Contemporary Art.