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joseph squier
3. Being an Artist, Becoming a Scholar
When I accepted a teaching position at the University of Illinois, I didn’t entirely realize what I was walking into. I had trained in an art school, in an environment defined by critique, intuition, and studio practice. It was a world of makers. The university, by contrast, was a world-class research institution, home to physicists, engineers, computer scientists. It was a place driven by observation, hypothesis, experimentation, and the pursuit of knowledge through analysis, logic, and measurable outcomes.
And yet, it turned out to be exactly where I needed to be.
What the university offered me was not just stability or title, it offered a new lens through which to view my own work. Immersed in a research culture, I began to see my creative practice not as separate from inquiry, but as a form of inquiry. Art could be rigorous. Speculative. Iterative. The studio could be a laboratory, not in metaphor, but in method.
This shift reshaped the questions I asked, the technologies I explored, and the conceptual frames I worked within. I continued to produce solo projects, works like Life With Father, Urban Diary, the place, and Flagrant World — each driven by my ongoing interest in memory, narrative systems, viewer participation, and the aesthetics of digital fragmentation. These were intensely personal investigations, created independently, outside of collaboration.
At the same time, the university was also a space of rich dialogue, and one of the most meaningful of those dialogues was with Nan Goggin. Nan brought to our collaborations a fierce intelligence, deep design sensibility, and a shared commitment to experimentation. Together, we created works such as Body, Space, Memory and In:side:Out, exploring intersections of digital media, identity, and embodied experience.
We also co-founded one of the first curated, web-based art spaces: @art Gallery, a platform that foregrounded digital practice at a time when most of the art world still viewed the web as peripheral. Later, we collaborated again in helping launch the literary journal Ninth Letter, where Nan and I shaped both the publication’s design ethos and its online presence, weaving together literary and visual cultures in new ways. These collaborations were never about merging identities. They were about extending practice — testing ideas, building platforms, experimenting with systems. My solo work and our collaborative projects existed in parallel, each enriching the other, each rooted in a belief that digital technologies could serve poetic, critical, and affective ends.
The University of Illinois taught me how to think like a researcher without abandoning what mattered most to me: image, attention, ambiguity, rhythm, and care. It allowed me to inhabit a space that was often invisible in both the art world and academia: the space where emotional resonance and intellectual rigor could coexist, where code could carry narrative weight, where poetic form could emerge from computational structure.
This environment didn’t constrain my practice, it expanded it.