CORY REYNOLDS | DATE 7/7/2020

Profound questions about space, time and material in Julia Christensen's 'Upgrade Available'

"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."