“Pondering” (2026) is a one year long video documentation of a field research site in the Deschutes National Forest. To create “Pondering,” Julia Oldham visited the site every month between January and December of 2025 to take numerous slow-motion drone shots, filming from the ground to the canopy. She stitched together 4 of these shots from each month to create an ongoing, vertically moving portrait of seasonal changes. Nestled among the ponderosa pines that she filmed is a research tower, Ameriflux US-Me4, that is equipped with remote sensing tools utilized by scientists at Oregon State University. Scientists routinely climb this tower to install and adjust devices and to gather data.
Inspired by scientists’ (and her own) frequent ascents up the 180-foot research tower, and their long-term observational experiments focused on this patch of forest, she developed this project as a way of chronicling changes over long stretches of time while moving ever-upward through the forest. This project is designed to take two different forms. It can be a fully immersive, full-round installation projected onto four walls; or it can be a single-channel, vertically-oriented video that displays the full year of footage all on one frame.