Julia Oldham is the third of four artists to be featured in the CFAR Project Incubator series spanning the 2023-24 academic year. The series is a partnership between the Knight Campus and the College of Design / Center for Art Research (CFAR). Oldham's series starts on Jan. 8 and will conclude on Feb. 1.

CFAR affords artists working in any medium the opportunity to explore and conceptualize new work as a part of a vibrant, interdisciplinary research community that is supported by cutting-edge facilities and technical staff. This program is born out of CFAR and Knight Campus’s goals to create nimble systems that catalyze innovation and discovery by responding to the needs of individual’s specific research agendas. The incubator's emphasis is not necessarily on the production of a body of work, but instead on speculative, practice-based inquiry focused on ideation, experimentation, prototyping, testing, fabricating, and theoretical research to initiate and incubate new work.

The concept of Oldham's project, The Hyperforest, "is an ongoing project that imagines trees that have evolved to become higher dimensional beings (Dendrotopes) in order to escape the dangers of clear cutting, climate change and catastrophic wildfire." As part of the project, she seeks to develop a mathematical description or data set describing a higher dimensional tree, or Dendrotope, and to then visualize that data using interactive computing. "To accomplish this, I will start with a data set describing a 3D model of a tree, and then add axes with additional data."

Learn more about CFAR and all of the scheduled artists for this year's incubator series. The CFAR Project Incubator series is made possible by a grant from the Ford Family Foundation.