Julia Christensen has been awarded a fellowship at the LACMA Art + Tech Lab for her project Upgrade Available. This is an ongoing investigation into how memory, identity, and legacy are shifting as we become more fluid with our electronics and recordable media.
From the project proposal: Upgrade Available is an installation that uses several generations of recording technology to tell a single networked narrative about upgrade culture, the unsustainable consumption of electronics, and our obsession with recording personal experience. With the support of the LACMA Art + Tech Lab, I will upgrade a selection of found home movies and photographs from the 1960’s and ‘70’s into 60 years of various media formats; I will simultaneously “downgrade” contemporary digital images and videos into that same lineage of recordable media. The resulting installation will be a room-sized cacophony of photographs, 35mm slide projections, televisions, computer screens, iPhones, iPads, digital video projections, 4D projection and more, displaying a shared story about how we attempt to preserve our identity, memory, and legacy on our electronic media.
This iteration of Upgrade Available is the penultimate piece in Christensen’s ongoing Creative Capital-supported project, which includes a number of pieces about upgrade culture.