LACMA VIDEO: ARTIST JULIA CHRISTENSEN AND THE JPL A-TEAM

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 helped 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.

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