Rust Belt/ Bayou 
Rust Belt/ Bayou is an aural exploration of two cities: Cleveland, Ohio, and New Orleans, Louisiana. For the past 
several years, Christensen’s artistic practice has been based in extensive travel throughout the United States, 
surveying the ways in which communities are changing in the shadow of corporate real estate development. 
During these travels, she has often been struck by the similarities between Cleveland, a city of the Rust Belt, 
and New Orleans, a city of the bayou. Both cities dwell on the shores of bodies of water with global reach: 
Cleveland on Lake Erie, New Orleans on the Mississippi River. Both cities have seen the boom and bust of 
industry and population throughout their histories — past and present. Cleveland and New Orleans look 
remarkably different, but Christensen has often noticed that they have sounds in common: industry, birds, 
water, tourists. Rust Belt / Bayou offers an interactive document of aural snapshots from recent trips to both 
New Orleans and Cleveland.Rust Belt / Bayou  is a comission from Turbulence.org/Networked Music Review
with funds from the New York State Music Fund, established by the New York State Attorney General at 
Rockefeller Philanthropy Advisors 

Big Box Reuse Website
The Big Box Reuse website first launched in 2004.  Since then, it has been named a Yahoo Pick of the Week, a 
Netscape Pick of the Day, and was on the San Francisco Bay Area Guardian's list of "Best Arty Websites of 2006."  
The website has been written about in the New York Times, the San Diego Union Tribune, Preservation Magazine 
of the National Trust, and has been linked to by hundreds of sites, including Kottke, Eyebeam, the Walker Art 
Center,Archinect, Interior Design Magazine, Treehugger, CBS, NBC, NPR, Good Magazine, Dwell Magazine,
the Center for Land Use Interpretation, The Atlantic Magazine, Readymade Magazine, and many more.

Big Box Reuse photographs
Photographs from the big box reuse series have shown at galleries and museums nationwide. Venues 
include: Center for Land Use Interpretation, Walker Art Center, Hite Art Institute (University of Louisville), Rensselaer 
Polytechnic Institute, The Sanctuary for Independent Media, Hudson Valley Teaching Gallery, Regina Gouger Miller 
Gallery, Carnegie Museum of Fine Arts, Yale University Architecture Galleries.

Disaster Studies 
Semeter-long collaboration with students at Stanford University. The project coincided with the 100 year anniversary 
of the San Francisco earthquare of 2006, which prompted extensive examination into the culture, remembrance,
life––and oddly, celebration––of disaster.  The earthquake commemoration was used as a jumping off point to study 
current disasters that are happening throughout the United States. The project culminated in a public intervention
at Stanford University, comparing Stanford's interpretation of earthquake awareness with the public's unawareness 
of issues in New Orleans provoked by Hurricane Katrina.

Blinking Girls
Blinking Girls is a video installation in which five seemingly separate videos are projected from a single video source.  
The five videos are mastered on to single video channel, which is then transferred to a DVD.  The sound is mastered on 
to a 5.1 matrix, and each video is linked to a single soundtrack.   Five structures are built to act as screens for the video 
projection, and a speaker is installed in each separate structure. In the end, the installation is a group of five 
sound-making, video pieces projected in space, all mastered on to a single DVD. The piece has shown in several 
locations, including Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, and the Hite Art Institute at the University of Louisville.

Megachurch Architecture
This series of photographs emerged from several visits to megachurches throughout the United States. 
The photographs, and associated essays, explore the architecture of the megachurch. 

My Audience
My Audience is a video installation in which 4 video projectors are used in order to project over 40 separate images into 
the seats of a concert hall. The audience must stand on the stage in order to view the piece, and they are faced with over 
40 silent, staring, moving, large video faces gazing back at them. The stage is covered in hidden microphones, and a 
Supercollider patch runs a slight delay on each sound course, and the sound is miked out over the house speakers.
In effect, the audience is standing on the stage, their movements making amplified sound for the piece, and the video is 
sitting in the seats of the audience, patiently watching. 

Our Penultimate Year Our Penultimate Year is a mini-series for radio by Jarred McAdams, which tells the cautionary tale of the meteoric rise of a young man and woman who become king and queen of the world. It is the result of five years of intensive writing, composition, and rehearsal. It features Jarred as the King and his long-time collaborator Julia Christensen as the Queen. Our Penultimate Year debuted on Neighborhood Public Radio on May 6, 2006. Archived recordings of the NPR broadcasts of OPY are available at the NPR Website here. Additional clips can be found on Jarred's website, here.

FMemory
FMemory was a collaboration between Michael Trigilio of Neighborhood Public Radio and the students in Julia's 
Transmission Arts Class.  Julia and her students built analog FM transmitters. Everyone made recordings of themselves 
telling stories about memories that they have, ranging about anything from food to early childhood to dreams to parties 
they had last week. Each of the transmitters––10 in all––were set up around the art complex at Oberlin College.  Each 
transmitter sent out a recording of a different memory on a different frequency.  Audience members brought portable radios, 
and wandered around the art building tuning around for the memory-frequencies.  In effect, memories were floating on the 
FM airwaves, and the audience members amplified them through the dozens of radios that they brought.   For pictures of the 
FMemory event, click here.  To read the class blog about the event, click here. (Neighborhood Public Radio was 
a guest on the Margin Release Lecture Series '08, produced by Julia Christensen at Oberlin College.)

Trapabikeapezoidapee

In the Spring of 2009, Simparch had an educational residency Oberlin as a part of the Luce Visiting Artist series, produced by Julia Christensen.  While at Oberlin, Simparch led the construction of a structure with Christensen and her students, drawing from ideas about participatory design, sustainability, Frank Lloyd Wright, Bucky Fuller, and community.  The result is a mobile, triangular, trapezoidal structure.  Inside, the structure houses a golden bike-powered smoothie blender machine.  The structure premiered as a float in Oberlin's annual Big Parade, and will spend the latter part of its life as a concession stand at a local farm.

Diversify or Decay: The Rust Belt Buckles
Land Arts in an Electronic Age is a class developed by Julia Christensen at Oberlin College.
During this class in 2008, Julia and Matthew Coolidge of the Center for Land Use Interpretation
took students on a field trip to Gary, Indiana.  While in Gary, the class explored the steelscape of the 
surrounding area in order to understand its history, the environment that hosts the steel industry, 
forming a deeper understanding of how that region connects to our lives around the world.
Students created an art exhibit derived from research prompted by the trip and the rest of the course,
and that documentation can be seen here.  The class website is here.  CLUI Lay of the Land Newsletter
article about the trip here.

WAM! Women and Art Music Ensemble
Julia Christensen is the founder and director of WAM! : The Women and Art Music Ensemble at 
Oberlin Conservatory.  WAM! is a group of ten women playing music written by living women 
composers.  The mission of WAM! is to bring a unified voice to the women involved in 
new music at Oberlin, promoting and giving a platform for the talented young women in the ensemble.
The mission is also to increase public knowledge about the long tradition of women
involved in the worlds of new music, so that a male-dominated history of this relatively new field does not ensue. 
Ultimately, we intend to increase female enrollment in the new music field at Oberlin, by making 
very public that there are indeed women making art music at Oberlin, and playing the music of other women too.
Click the go to the WAM website.      

The Margin Release Lecture Series
Julia produces the The Margin Release Lecture Series as a part of her endowed chair at Oberlin College and Conservatory, 
The Henry Luce Professorship of the Emerging Arts.  The goal of the series is to bring artists, musicians, thinkers, and makers 
to campus that will bridge thought across academic and artistic disciplines.  Artists generally give a public lecture
on campus that is free and open to the public.  Often, participants also engage in a creative endeavor with the Oberlin
students, such as field trips, film screenings, collaborative art shows, and construction activities.  
Click here to see the list of participants since 2007.