Upgrade Available

Julia Christensen

Julia Christensen’s ongoing project, Upgrade Available, investigates how “upgrade culture”—the perceived relentless need to endlessly upgrade electronics and recordable media to remain relevant—impacts life on a range of time scales. The artist’s work with the LACMA Art + Technology Lab has allowed her to explore how upgrade culture impacts institutional operations at the scale of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. Her work at LACMA additionally led her to a collaboration with scientists at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, where she is helping envision long-term space mission concepts that defy our current measure of technological obsolescence. At JPL’s Innovation Foundry, Julia has collaborated on spaceship/art concepts for a CubeSat with a 200-year operational lifespan, and an interstellar spacecraft that would travel to Proxima b, 4.2 light years from Earth.

Julia Christensen on "Upgrade Available"

Later this fall, Art + Technology Lab grant recipient Julia Christensen will be in Los Angeles to work on her project Upgrade Available. She'll be participating in a special meeting at Jet Propulsion Laboratory to envision an artwork for a long-term interstellar space mission and will also be "in residence" at LACMA, where she will discuss her ideas with scientists, engineers, designers, artists, and curators.

Adventures in Art and Science: Working with JPL's A-Team

This is the second installment of our Q&A with Art + Technology Lab grant recipient Julia Christensen. A few weeks ago, Julia participated in a special meeting at Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) to envision an artwork for a long-term interstellar space mission.

Julia Christensen and "The Tree of Life"

This is the third installment of our Q&A with Art + Technology Lab grant recipient Julia Christensen. For the past eight months, Julia has been working with Jet Propulsion Laboratory's (JPL) A-Team to envision an artwork for a long-term interstellar space mission.

Listening to the Trees

This is the fourth installment of our Q&A with Art + Technology Lab grant recipient Julia Christensen. Over the past year, Julia has collaborated with a group of scientists at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) on a project that has evolved into a mission to design and implement a 200-year satellite that will communicates with trees on Earth. The project is called The Tree of Life.

What Remains: Estate Sale 1, digital photograph from Upgrade Available, 2015

Disk Unreadable 1, digital photograph from Upgrade Available, 2018

LACMA Archives 3, digital photograph from Upgrade Available, 2019

Installation detail from Burnouts, Julia Christensen, 2014

Upgrade Available: Live and Illustrated

Transcript: Conversation with Julia Christensen and Dr. Anthony Freeman at LACMA, October 28, 201891.99 KB

Julia Christensen is an artist and writer whose work explores time, change, memory, and technology. She has an interdisciplinary, project-based practice, and her research manifests as video, photography, drawings, illustrated talks, animation, installation, and a range of electronic media. She is also a writer; her forthcoming book, Upgrade Available, will be published by Dancing Foxes Press.

Artist Website

Upgrade Available

Art + Tech Lab Archive