Oberlin Research Review

A Cosmic Duet

For Julia Christensen, the distinctive convergence of art and technology is explored through connections with leading aerospace engineers—and the music created by trees.

March 21, 2025

Eloise Rich ’26

A black-and-white scientific illustration of a large tree, possibly a sequoia, alongside three diagrams. — Cover art from the limited edition vinyl record.

Image credit: Courtesy of Space Song Foundation: Tree Songs Art Center

The question of obsolescence—whether a technology, artwork, product, or idea remains relevant—is crucial to the work of artists and scientists. Obsolescence is relevant for myriad reasons. For one, we are often left wondering how much time we have left, with both our technology and life itself. At the same time, contemporary scientific and artistic developments are informed by previous trends.

Trees have power, like humans do, to regulate climate and vastly shape the world we live in.

A vinyl record and its sleeve featuring a minimalist black-and-white scientific illustration. The cover art includes a tall tree, a cross-section of its rings, a radial branching diagram, and a circular schematic resembling a record. Julia Christensen, the Eva and John Young-Hunter Professor of Integrated Media, has been working on projects related to obsolescence and technology for several years. Through a 2017 Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) Art + Tech Lab Fellowship, she connected with engineers and scientists at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory who were also thinking about obsolescence, specifically in the context of long-term space missions. A group at the lab was working on a study to develop a potential spacecraft launch to our nearest exoplanetary neighbor, Proxima b. With the proposed technologies, this equals a 42-year journey.

Christensen was asked to come up with an art project to be embedded on such a craft, which was slated to launch in 2069, and settled on something music-related. She first faced a “complex conceptual problem,” as she puts it. “It takes 4.2 years for any data to travel back to Earth because data travels at the speed of light. We’re looking at an 80-year timeline here for this technology.”

And as Christensen began to think about what to record, she came back to the obsolescence of life on Earth. “Humans will come and go between now and our Proxima b mission,” she explains. “But there are species that will be here for the whole time. Some fish live for a long time; so does coral.”

Eventually, Christensen decided to focus on something else long-lasting—trees, which she says are “potentially the most important cornerstone of our ecosystem. Trees have power, like humans do, to regulate climate and vastly shape the world we live in.”

This idea grew into The Tree of Life, a project of a nonprofit called the Space Song Foundation that Christensen co-chairs with Steve Matousek, a longtime project manager at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory. This project involves putting sensors on trees around the world that read light, water, and temperature. The numeric data gathered from these sensors is translated into frequencies that can be interpreted both visually and aurally. On a daily basis, variations in frequency arise as a result of the Earth’s natural rotation, determining whether the wired trees are facing the sun. In the long term, changes in frequency describe seasons and even global shifts in climate.

“We are making this ongoing song of the trees around the planet,” Christensen says. “The idea is we start that song now, and when an interstellar spacecraft launches in 50 years, we can etch the sine waves produced by our trees on the side of the craft.”

There’s precedent for this: In 1977, two phonograph records called the Voyager Golden Records launched aboard the interstellar space probes Voyager 1 and Voyager 2. These also comprise sonic representations of life on Earth, encompassing whale songs and compositions by Beethoven and Mozart, and they have staying power. As of January 2025, the Golden Records remain in space.

“The Tree of Life’s cosmic duet can be embedded on future interstellar spacecrafts telling a story about life on Earth,” Christensen says. “But this time, it’s from the perspective of the trees that support our terrestrial ecosystem and the technology we build. It’s like a Golden Record but of the trees, facilitated by the humans and by the technology that we build.”

Some of the work has been released already on Bandcamp. All of this data will be publicly available and welcome both scientific and artistic “remixes” in addition to being part of the spacecraft.

“For me, having these sonifications of data is really interesting from an artistic and cultural perspective,” she says. “But we’ve always wanted the project to have as much scientific integrity as it does artistic integrity, and this auditory system that we’ve built is really helpful for scientists. They’ve said when you’re parsing an immense amount of data, it’s sometimes easier to hear a shift or a change than it is to see it.”

At its core, The Tree of Life is a meditation on scientific and artistic longevity. “A lot of the scientists that I’m working with are visionary people,” Christensen says. “We’ve realized we’re asking the same questions: Who are we? Why are we here? How long have we got? Is there anybody else out there? All the same existential questions underlie their scientific and engineering work, along with the grand artistic questions about life.”

Julia Christensen’s multidisciplinary research navigates the world between art, technology, and time. She earned an MFA in electronic music and recording media at Mills College and an MFA in integrated technology arts at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute and was a 2018 Guggenheim Fellow.