"The Ohio-based artist Julia Christensen talks to Gabrielle Schwarz about how a visit to an e-waste processing centre in India sparked an obsession with our throwaway culture, and how that has fed into a book and an exhibition titled ‘Upgrade Available’."
"Upgrade Available is fundamentally a book of technological disillusionment, as it pulls back the curtain to show us what we do not want to see: our obsession with tech has catastrophic consequences. We are stuck in the wrong timescale, consumed by upgrade culture, which ensures we are always struggling to keep up."
Alex Teplitzky interview Julia Christensen about Upgrade Available on the Creative Capital website: "Julia Christensen Examines our Obsession with Upgrading Technology"
Read full article here.
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.
Read the full article here.
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.
"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."
"If he’s a sometimes luddite, let him find solace in artist Julia Christensen’s Upgrade Available, a new output from Dancing Foxes Press. The book calls into question our eagerness to constantly update our personal technology and how this thirst is interfering with our relationship to time. It’s charming and eerie."
"Meanwhile, the US-based artist Julia Christensen surveys how humans are increasingly changing the Earth in a virtual conference hosted by the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (Lacma) with Rhizome curator Aria Dean and museum archivist Jessica Gambling. Discussing the artist’s forthcoming book Upgrade Available, a multimedia project and (now virtual) exhibition of the same title, the speakers will explore how “upgrade culture”—a term Christensen has coined to describe the cultural phenomenon in which humans have developed an insatiable urge to modernise their electronics—permeates our personal lives and reshapes the environment."
Christensen, an artist and writer, has been studying the concept of “upgrade culture” for nearly a decade. Her approach has been multidisciplinary, as she’s worked with scientists, academics, artists, and activists to investigate the appalling proliferation of e-waste and consider the potential solutions to technological obsolescence.
“Upgrade Available: Live and Illustrated—Julia Christensen in Conversation with Aria Dean and Jessica Gambling” at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art
The opening of Julia Christensen’s solo show, co-presented by ArtCenter and LACMA’s Art + Technology Lab, has been postponed, but the writer and artist is giving an online presentation about her forthcoming book, Upgrade Available, this week. The book (as well as her project with the lab) explores how “upgrade culture”—the constant pressure to update our electronic devices—informs our sense of the passage of time.
