“We have to go back to kindergarten. We have to get back to the level of those who have not yet learned to read and write. In this kindergarten, we will have to play infantile games with computers, plotters, and similar gadgets. We must use complex and refined apparatuses, the fruit of a thousand years of intellectual development, for childish purposes.”
—Vilém Flusser, “Does Writing Have a Future?”

Born 1978, Chicago, Illinois

Joel Swanson is an interdisciplinary artist exploring the complex relationships between language, materiality, and technology. Working across discursive media—from neon text-based sculpture and obsessively detailed works on paper to new media works and large-scale public art—he investigates how linguistic tools and technologies subtly but profoundly shape meaning. As director of the TYPO Lab at the University of Colorado Boulder's ATLAS Institute, where he serves as Associate Professor, Swanson leads experimental investigations into the boundaries of text-based technologies.

Swanson’s practice denaturalizes language, making visible the physical and technological infrastructures and ideologies we typically take for granted. By disrupting language’s default transparency, his work reveals how written and spoken systems are always embodied, material, and shaped by particular tools and technologies. His methodology of queering/querying language disrupts conventional systems of meaning by amplifying their failures, slippages, and generative noise. Recent work excavates the commercial material culture of literacy acquisition: Alphabet Flash Cards, Pink Pearl erasers, Alpha-Bits cereal, and footage from Sesame Street—examining how everyday pedagogical tools shaped his formative relationship with written language. Drawing on both Pop Art’s embrace of vernacular objects and conceptual art’s analytical rigor, Swanson creates works that are simultaneously systematic and absurd, revealing how language systems promise coherence while generating unexpected poetic debris.

Swanson’s work has garnered international recognition, with exhibitions at venues including the MCA Denver (2012), MSU Broad Art Museum (2012), the Power Plant in Toronto (2013), the 57th Venice Biennale (official satellite exhibition in 2017), and Ireland's Glucksman Museum (2019). His accomplishments include a solo exhibitions at the Museum of Contemporary Art Denver (2014), Pardon Arts (2022) RedLine Contemporary Art Center (2025) and artist residencies at La Napoule Art Foundation (2024), HANGAR - Centro de Investigação Artística (2023), the Banff Center for Arts and Creativity (2018), and RedLine Contemporary Art Center (2010–2012). He is a Black Cube Nomadic Art Museum Fellow and his work is featured in the Electronic Literature Organization's 4th Anthology. Swanson received his MFA from the University of California, San Diego, specializing in Computing and the Arts.