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Victoria Bradford is dressed in a shirt and tie and waving her arms around. “I want people to have a personal experience with my work,” she says spiritedly. “Art isn’t just about you or for you, it comes from a personal conversation with yourself that you want to share.” Her work is all about communication: between others, with yourself, and via the digital divide. Victoria’s experience in the arts has spanned a variety of media: dance, clay, paint, paper-making, and more. This fall, her first semester at Columbia, she tried her hand at video art for the first time as a submission for the show At Close Distance: Labyrinth of Self. Victoria’s entry was accepted, and is now on display in three videos, titled “Modern Love Letter.” “I wanted to express how fleeting modern communication is by exploring the narrative found in your sent box,” she says. “How the immediacy changes how and why we communicate, and how these messages become less about who you’re corresponding to, and more about what you’re revealing about yourself.” In her piece, ones and zeros flash and shimmer across the screen while voices quietly converse in the background, creating awareness of the strange ways we communicate and how it’s affected us. It’s hard to believe that Victoria has never worked in video, as she seems at home in the medium’s storytelling dimensions. That’s part of the reason she came to Columbia, she explains; not only to create in new media, but to be creating again at all. “After undergraduate, I kind of put my art on hold,” Victoria says. “I started a non-profit in my hometown of Lake Charles, Louisiana, where I curated shows for other artists.” From that position, she was offered a job with the state of Louisiana, working in their cultural department. “I spent a lot of time at that job helping other people create art,” she says with a smile. Eventually