Welcome to Julie TV

Growing up, I didn’t always speak the same language as my parents. I watched and listened learning how to navigate the sounds, rhythms, and gestures of our household. This environment shaped the lens through which I look at life — as a fully immersed outsider, smack dab in the middle of things, but as a spectator, not a participant.

My role as observer was reinforced by my love of television. It’s been a constant companion. As a latchkey kid, it was parent, teacher, friend, and babysitter. It smoothed over awkward silences and filled the empty spaces of being alone. With its radiation replacing the warm glow of a hearth, television(and now screens in general) has become our modern day fireplace and campfire where we gather to listen to stories. Is it a coincidence that they hold,simultaneously, opposite ideas like security and danger, hope and despair,excitement and foreboding, comfort and destruction? We like to look. It’s a pattern of dread and desire.

But even when people don’t share the same language, I think everyone has a desire to be deeply understood. To be accepted and forgiven for our faults and mistakes rather than being embraced and celebrated only for our successes.Sometimes, seeking this level of understanding feels futile, an unachievable goal too exhausting to chase. But sometimes, you connect.

It’s what E.M. Forster told us to do: “Only connect.” But that seems too simple, too obvious. There must be more to it. Like a secret-coded message. It makes me wonder about the nature of messages: the suspended space between sending and receiving them, what gets lost in translation, how hope sustains or succumbs with time, and what happens messages are misunderstood or never received at all.

One of the reasons I created Julie TV was to attempt to follow Forster’s advice to connect. It is the device through which I transmit the messages created from the stories, sights, and sounds that emerge from my collection of fragments, both created and found.It functions as both platform and artwork serving as an evolving multimedia environment exploring the intimate distances that are created when we are only observationally connected. It holds my investigations about communication, control, and our attempts to construct meaning from incomplete information.

The work I share on Julie TV has been called everything from visual podcasts to visual concept albums to video memoirs and video essays. Call them whatever you’d like. My hope is that you’ll find them entertainingly confronting, reassuringly confounding, unsettlingly soothing, and, at times, disturbingly funny.

Thanks for watching!