Exhibition

Julia Oldham: Loneliness Creeps Down the Spine, Part I

December 2nd, 2020 - December 6th, 2020

Reception: December 2nd, 2020 - 7PM

...her advice is quirky and fantastical, utilizing math and probability to build meaning out of the text in the books that she has stored in her corpus.

Exhibition Images

These are a selected group of works and installation photographs from the exhibition. For a complete list of available works please contact us.

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Julia Oldham: Loneliness Creeps Down the Spine, Part I

BRIDGET is a deep learning machine (AI) that I programmed to offer soothing advice from a large selection of self help books. Though she uses nearly 1000 books to learn from, half of which contain “self help” or “mindfulness” in the title, her advice is quirky and fantastical, utilizing math and probability to build meaning out of the text in the books that she has stored in her corpus. I have performed her advice, taking on the persona of BRIDGET, to create this video, which is presented in the style of YouTube self-hypnosis and self-help videos. The title of my project, “Loneliness Creeps Down the Spine,” was also text generated by BRIDGET.

About Julia Oldham

Julia Oldham’s work expresses moments of hope in a world on the edge of collapse. Working in a range of media including video, animation and photography, she explores potential in places where human civilization, nature and technology have collided uneasily. Selected exhibitions and screenings include Smack Mellon in Brooklyn, NY; Art in General in New York, NY; the Northwest Film Center at the Portland Art Museum, Portland, OR; The Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago, IL; Disjecta, Portland, OR; he Peabody Essex Museum in Salem, MA; the Queens Museum in Queens, NY; the Schneider Museum in Ashland, OR; the Dia Foundation at the Hispanic Society in New York, NY; the Smithsonian Hirshhorn Museum in Washington, DC; and she was included in the 2016 Portland Biennial curated by Michelle Grabner. She received her MFA from the University of Chicago in 2005.

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Related

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Julia Oldham, Loneliness Creeps Down the Spine, Part I, 2020. Video 11:05.

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