Julia’s First Interview is a site-responsive installation and performance shown at Icebox Project Space in Philadelphia, PA that critiques digital labor within today’s digital economy. The work stages the job interview as a bureaucratic performance in which subjectivity is rendered as data to be sorted and potentially discarded. The installation materializes the hidden labor and algorithmic infrastructures that shape contemporary economies of visibility and efficiency.
At the center of the work is Julia, a character perpetually trying, and failing, to fit into systems not built for her. Dressed in a green screen suit, she becomes a metaphor for assimilation: simultaneously present and erasable, visible only through mediating technologies. Her chroma-keyed body shows how fragile seamless systems are, and how forcing someone to fit into them can be harmful.
Julia engages in an ongoing dialogue with “the Boss,” a cardboard robot puppet whose speech is generated using AI text models trained from Reddit and corporate speak. Their interaction collapses distinctions between performer and interface, revealing how institutional systems convert participation into data. The project reframes inefficiency and refusal as critical tactics.