By Julia Christensen. Edited by Karen Kelly, Barbara Schroeder. Conversations with Ravi Agarwal, Cory Arcangel, Lori Emerson, Jessica Gambling, Rick Prelinger, Bobbye Tigerman, Laura Welcher.
Technological evolution and obsolescence on Earth and in outer space, in a new project by artist Julia Christensen
This volume documents an ongoing investigation by artist Julia Christensen (born 1976) into how our relentless "upgrade culture"—the perceived notion that we need to constantly upgrade our electronics to remain relevant—fundamentally impacts our experience of time. In a personal narrative interspersed with related interdisciplinary artwork and conversations with experts from different fields (other artists, archivists, academics), Christensen takes readers along a path from the international "e-waste" industry to institutional archives, eventually leading her to NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL).
At JPL, Christensen began a dialog with a group of exo-planetary scientists, engineers and machine learning experts to develop long-lived space mission concepts that include an update of the Voyager spacecrafts’ 1977 "Golden Record," to be embedded on a hypothetical future interstellar spacecraft. She and the scientists are designing an artwork generated by an extraterrestrial system that tells a distinctly new story of life on Earth. In taking on this challenge, Christensen—a female pioneer redefining the intersection of art, technology, and outer space—must envision an artwork for an evolving, autonomously-upgrading spaceship headed toward a potentially habitable planet in another star system. Her years-long investigation into upgrade culture leads to design concepts that potentially transcend technological obsolescence altogether.
"Batteries, Mustafabad Market (Delhi,
India)", 2015, from the series Technology Time
(2011–ongoing) is reproduced from 'Upgrade Available.'
PRAISE AND REVIEWS
Author of The Forest Unseen, Pulitzer finalist, and The Songs of Trees, winner of the Burroughs Medal. Professor, University of the South
David George Haskell
An extraordinary exploration of nature, time, and technology. Julia Christensen offers a terrifying and enlightening exposition of our relationship to time and material. She also shows how we can transcend our culture of obsolescence and reach out to wrap other species in a matured sense of time. The book sparkles with insight and unexpected connections.
TED Senior Fellow and Founder and CEO, Coeio, Inc.
Jae Rhim Lee
Julia Christensen's book and body of work exemplifies why we should look to artists for novel perspectives and responses to complex social phenomena: for the discipline-transcending, research-based, delightfully non-linear, and ultimately transformative interventions and solutions.
Artist, educator, and author of How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy
Jenny Odell
Christensen’s writing and conversations illustrate the complex, fascinating and often fraught relationship of technology to different time scales, where outdated artifacts both contain our personal memories and litter outer space. Her attitude toward time is as humane as it is useful, allowing us to imagine planning for something other than our own obsolescence.
New Yorker staff writer and author of The Dinosaur Artist
Paige Williams
A brilliant, beautiful, terrifying, timely, surprising, delightful book. Upgrade Available illuminates our e-world (living and dead), waking us to our place on this ever-burdened planet. If only all of us were as inquisitive and mindful as Julia Christensen, regarding our daily relationship to technology. Christensen explores profound questions about space and time alongside our material visions for the future, our detritus left behind. Upgrade is deeply impressive.
Associate Professor, History of Art, The Ohio State University, and author of Here/There: Telepresence, Touch, and Art at the Interface
Kris Paulsen
We are in a moment of reckoning: now or never, we must face the mountains of trash we produce each year, the persistent myth of its recyclability, and what to do about it. In an account that is both personal and sweeping, Julia Christensen turns her artistic and academic focus upon the global traffic of “e-waste,” the outmoded electronic consumer goods that we are compelled to continually discard then upgrade to stay connected. Part travelogue and part media archaeology, Upgrade Available meditates on the ways in which the logic of the upgrade has reshaped our relationships to time and to the planet. Bringing together artists, technologists, curators, and activists in a series of conversations and essays, Christensen begins an urgent investigation of the future of preservation on a grand scale: in an era of disposability, how can might we save anything, including humanity and the earth itself.
Art Newspaper
Wallace Ludel
[Christensen] has rummaged through e-waste facilities in India, and has envisioned an updated Golden Record with NASA to send into space.
Hyperallergic
Elisa Wouk-Almino
Investigates the Effects of Technological Obsolescence
Cultured
Editors
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.
Brooklyn Rail
Hall W. Rockefeller
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.
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"What Remains (Estate Sale 1)" (2014) is reproduced Upgrade Available, Julia Christensen's investigation of how "upgrade culture"—the perceived notion that we need to constantly upgrade our electronics to remain relevant—fundamentally impacts our experience of time. "We encode our electronics with our memory, our identity, and our legacy," Christensen writes. "Once it is time to throw them away, we have transformed them into very complicated pieces of trash. And given the short cycles of technology time, our electronic memories, identities, and legacies produce a huge material flow on our planet. Maybe the public has a difficult time separating the objects from our experiences, our relationships, our jobs, so it is difficult to construe them as trash after their cycle of technology time has come to a close. We will each live through hundreds of cycles of technology time. It is happening right now, across the devices that aid our productivity, simultaneous frames of technology time defining our experience. We strive to mesh technology time with the broader cycles of time we experience. And we encode our electronics with our identity, our memory and our legacy in order to—ironically—attempt to transcend real time altogether." continue to blog
Published by Dancing Foxes Press. By Julia Christensen. Edited by Karen Kelly, Barbara Schroeder. Conversations with Ravi Agarwal, Cory Arcangel, Lori Emerson, Jessica Gambling, Rick Prelinger, Bobbye Tigerman, Laura Welcher.
Technological evolution and obsolescence on Earth and in outer space, in a new project by artist Julia Christensen
This volume documents an ongoing investigation by artist Julia Christensen (born 1976) into how our relentless "upgrade culture"—the perceived notion that we need to constantly upgrade our electronics to remain relevant—fundamentally impacts our experience of time. In a personal narrative interspersed with related interdisciplinary artwork and conversations with experts from different fields (other artists, archivists, academics), Christensen takes readers along a path from the international "e-waste" industry to institutional archives, eventually leading her to NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL).
At JPL, Christensen began a dialog with a group of exo-planetary scientists, engineers and machine learning experts to develop long-lived space mission concepts that include an update of the Voyager spacecrafts’ 1977 "Golden Record," to be embedded on a hypothetical future interstellar spacecraft. She and the scientists are designing an artwork generated by an extraterrestrial system that tells a distinctly new story of life on Earth. In taking on this challenge, Christensen—a female pioneer redefining the intersection of art, technology, and outer space—must envision an artwork for an evolving, autonomously-upgrading spaceship headed toward a potentially habitable planet in another star system. Her years-long investigation into upgrade culture leads to design concepts that potentially transcend technological obsolescence altogether.
