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. 

What Remains: Estate Sale 1, digital photograph from Upgrade Available, 2015
What Remains: Estate Sale 1, digital photograph from Upgrade Available, 2015
Disk Unreadable 1, digital photograph from Upgrade Available, 2018
Disk Unreadable 1, digital photograph from Upgrade Available, 2018
LACMA Archives 3, digital photograph from Upgrade Available, 2019
LACMA Archives 3, digital photograph from Upgrade Available, 2019
Installation detail from Burnouts, Julia Christensen, 2014
Installation detail from Burnouts, Julia Christensen, 2014
Upgrade Available: Live and Illustrated
About the Artist

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

Art + Tech Lab Archive