KCRW: 5 DESIGN THINGS TO DO IN LOS ANGELES

Ever wonder where your last cell phone ended up or why you only kept that cell phone for a matter of months? For nearly a decade, artist and writer Julia Christensen has investigated the phenomenon of “upgrade culture” - the notion that we need to constantly upgrade our electronics to remain relevant, and how this impacts our personal lives and the environment.

Now Upgrade Available, an exhibition of nearly fifty artworks by Christensen,  goes on show at the Merle Mullin Gallery at ArtCenter College of Design.  Some of the works were collaborations with LACMA’s Art + Technology Lab and JPL’s Innovation Foundry.

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GLASSTIRE: NOT IF, BUT WHEN: AN ARTIST LOOKS INTO UPGRADE CULTURE

Upgrade Available reads like a carefully curated exhibition, drawing from interviews, art, archives, and cultural theory. Broken into four sections, Christensen pushes the questions of inevitability and ephemerality of material technology in nuanced, careful, and curious ways. Christensen’s sculptural installation Burnout, for example, is a series of video projectors lit by old “non-working” iPhones — it illuminates, as it were, the “afterlives” of discarded cell phones. The variety of media she offers audiences to unpack this deep, complex theme guarantees a new way of thinking about the upgrade phenomenon. 

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HYPERALLERGIC: NATURE FILTERED THROUGH A SCREEN

"It’s fitting that Upgrade Available works well as a book, considering its misgivings about technological obsolescence. It works so well in part because Christensen is an insightful writer — with a penchant for neologistic concepts such as “upgrade culture,” “technology time,” and “institution time” — and in part because the project itself, brimming with narrative and conceptual complexities, is perfectly suited to written discourse. The book format left me especially curious to experience the artworks in person."

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