#juliachristensen

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Earth Day Recommended Reading: Upgrade Available by Julia Christensen ⁠⁠ ⁠⁠ This volume documents an ongoing investigation by artist @juliacjuliac 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 @nasajpl ⁠⁠ ⁠⁠ 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.⁠⁠ ⁠⁠ Edited by @karenjeannekelly & Barbara Schroeder. Conversations with @ravig64 Cory Arcangel, @loriemerson Jessica Gambling, Rick Prelinger, @tigerwoman Laura Welcher.⁠⁠ ⁠⁠ Published by @dancing_foxes⁠⁠ ⁠⁠ Read more via linkinbio.⁠⁠ ⁠⁠ #upgradeavailable #JuliaChristensen #sustainability #earthday2021 https://www.instagram.com/p/CN-XCMApWyd/?igshid=9wr4wt9fpuwl

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Congrats Dancing Foxes and Julia Christensen on this great feature including 'Upgrade Available' @hyperallergic⁠⠀ ⁠⠀ "Artist Julia Christensen’s concept of “upgrade culture”—the belief that new digital technologies need constantly to replace old ones—offers a big-picture perspective on questions of replaceability in both art and life. Her excellent artist book from Dancing Foxes Press, 'Upgrade Available,' as well as an eponymous online exhibition at @artcenteredu explore the material consequences of upgrade culture’s consumerist logic… The book showcases the project in its full depth and breadth. It includes images, thematically organized essays by, and conversations with Christensen (her conversation about e-waste with Indian artist Ravi Agarwal is particularly eye-opening). It would be hard to overstate how consistently Dancing Foxes Press develops this type of ambitious art project into an appealing, context-rich book; its catalogue, now almost a decade old, sets a high standard for what an artist book can be and do.⁠⠀ 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." ⁠⠀ ⁠⠀ Please order from your local independent #bookstorehero — many are reopening or offering curbside pickup! You can also order from local independents via @bookshop_org or #indiebound⁠⁠⁠. Or order directly from @artbookps1 @artbookhwla or artbook.com.⁠⠀⁠⠀ ⁠⠀ @upgradeavailable @juliacjuliac @ravig64 @dancing_foxes #upgradeavailable #juliachristensen https://www.instagram.com/p/CCWVxsdJfwm/?igshid=i8ba3wci6pgc

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Images from '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."⁠⠀ ⁠⠀ Please order from your local independent #bookstorehero — many are reopening or offering curbside pickup! You can also order from local independents via @bookshop_org or #indiebound⁠⁠⁠. Or order directly from @artbookps1 @artbookhwla or artbook.com.⁠⠀⁠⠀⁠⠀⁠⠀ ⁠⠀ @upgradeavailable @juliacjuliac @dancing_foxes #upgradeavailable #juliachristensen #upgradeculture https://www.instagram.com/p/CCWIaC0ph6A/?igshid=fytv8o49xqu1