Taking on hybrid forms—video sculpture, intermedia performance, and installation—Julia Caswell Freund’s work reflects the simultaneity of digital and physical experiences symptomatic of post-internet life.
Through an idiosyncratic visual lexicon, she fuses sensory stimuli with the fever-dreamlike aesthetics of advertising. Her collaborations draw from a range of fields and interests, prompting interdisciplinary engagement.
Keeping with post-war performance art traditions of corporality, JCF incorporates not only the body but also cognition into her work, re-contextualizing early performance art within a contemporary attention economy.
JCF uses gestures and imagery from political broadcast media, childhood games, mechanical processes, and service industry protocols, often incorporating her personal curation within a custom machine learning model. She is increasingly interested in how her personal connections within the ASMR (Autonomous Sensory Meridian Response) community subtly challenge the commodification of attention and emotion in her own life, integrating this intimacy of sensory aesthetics into her practice.
Julia Caswell Freund (b. 1994) is an artist, researcher, media broadcast engineer, and educator. She earned her BFA from the University of Texas at Austin in 2017. Between 2017 and 2019, she lived and worked in southern Malawi, supporting grassroots USAID initiatives. In 2023, she was a recipient of an award to artists from the Dallas Museum of Art. She is currently pursuing an MFA in the New Media program at the University of North Texas, where she is expected to graduate in 2026.