“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.
So, why should people be thinking critically about upgrade culture? “Clearly, the environmental disaster that is being wreaked upon our planet is critical,” says Christensen. On the micro-level, though, Christen says that it’s important to think and talk about how much control we have over our relationship with electronics. “So much of this upgrade culture, it feels like it’s forced upon us,” she says. “As a consumer public, I hope that, increasingly, we have more agency over what that looks like.”
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.
LACMA: Art+Technology Lab | Artist Julia Christensen works w/ NASA scientists on spaceship & art concepts
View full video here.
“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.”