Public Artwork for trees and a spacecraft The Tree of Life is the primary project of The Space Song Foundation, a collaborative effort between Julia Christensen and space scientists and engineers, to design spacecraft and interplanetary communication technology that can operate for 200 years or more. The project grew out of a series of studies…
Portfolio Categories: ART
ARCHIVED OBSOLESCENCE
Digital photographsDimensions variableSeries of twelve2018-2019 As a fellow at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art’s Art + Tech Lab, Julia Christensen began photographing obsolete ephemera in the LACMA archives. She took a selection of the ephemera to the Media Archaeology Lab at the University of Colorado in Boulder to upgrade the lost artifacts into…
WAITING FOR A BREAK
Public video kiosk displaying live feeds from seven networked cameras situated on islands and shores across Lake Erie; Digital photographs; Video Waiting For A Break is a live, public art piece commissioned by LAND Studio for Public Square, in Cleveland, Ohio, as a part of the LANDFORM program. A large public video kiosk on Public Square displayed live feeds of…
TECHNOLOGY TIME
Digital photographsDimensions variableSeries of 12 photographs2015 We encode our electronics with our memory, identity, and legacy, creating complicated artifacts, and eventually, complicated trash. The relentless need to upgrade software and hardware to remain relevant has made it increasingly difficult to plan very far into the future, leading consumers to make short-sighted decisions that negatively impact…
HARD COPY
Digital photographsDimensions variableSeries of 12 photographs2014-2020 Hard Copy is a series of photographs of recordable media collections that friends and neighbors store in their homes, despite the face that they will never access them again due to obsolescence. The photographs investigate the relationships we have with recordable media, and how the phenomenon of hoarding old…
UPGRADE AVAILABLE
www.upgrade-available.com Upgrade Available is the title of Christensen’s ongoing investigation into how “upgrade culture”––the perceived notion that we need to constantly upgrade our electronics to remain relevant––impacts our experience of time. The series of artworks illuminate how the relentless upgrade impacts our personal lives, institutional archives and operations, and long-term scientific research. The interdisciplinary artwork…
PHONEY
Augmented reality, iPhone, mural “Julia Christensen explores the ways in which systems of technology affect human cognition. Her motivation to realize Phoney arose from the global prominence of fake news during the 2016 U.S. presidential election. In response, Christensen developed augmented reality technology for mobile phones to alter recently published articles about U.S. immigration policy.…
WE SHARE OUR PICTURES
Ink on paper, 22 x 30, Series of 10 TriptychsWe Share Our Pictures consists of ten triptychs of drawings made on a mechanical digital drawing plotter. The images in the drawings are all sourced from found slide collections made in the 1970’s. One of these collections consists of photographs of the artist’s family; the rest…
BURNOUTS
Multimedia installation (ABS 3D printed plastic video projectors; iPhones; animation)Burnouts is a series of five sculptural video projectors that use discarded iPhones as the sole light source. The mechanisms project animations of “retired” constellations on the gallery ceiling––constellations in the night sky that are deemed no longer relevant to the study of the night sky,…
THE CHUCK CLOSE TAPES
Single-channel video installation; custom vitrines and VHS tapesThe Chuck Close Tapes is a video installation consisting of VHS tapes that were allegedly made by the artist Chuck Close. In 2013, Christensen was given a thousand VHS tapes filled with random television episodes and movies recorded from a VCR in the 1990’s. She was told that the…