Review: ‘Upload’ Asks Old Questions with New Technology


This moment offers a patient wash of silence and humanity after 80 minutes of live drama. “Upload” contains elements from the dark speculative series “Black Mirror” and the relatively promising “Years and Years,” but they are as timeless preoccupations as they are the best genre fiction.

“Upload” is not entirely fictional. This is our future and our present: a already stated ambition In order to upload consciousness onto a decentralized blockchain, our images and inner thoughts—preformed by our own traces that we have already placed on the internet—are slowly building what the “Upload” clinic (filmed at the modernist Zonnestraal sanatorium in the Netherlands) will call a Mind. The dossier for our digital afterlife.

How this file was created is detailed in filmed sequences starring Ashley Zukerman (“Succession”), Katja Herbers (“Bad”) as a stereotypical Silicon Valley type, arrogantly enthusiastic and uninterested in waiting for government regulation and Empathetic psychiatrist. is described as. Has overconfidence. The technology is only available to a privileged few, the kind of people who would fly into space for recreational purposes. Or here, buy eternal life at the cost of death to avoid both the ethical and ecological complications of multiple attributions.

For these scenes, van der Aa writes a soundtrack less than an operatic score and more of a soundtrack, with taut strings, chaotic percussion, and electronics turning into crackling white noise, restless yet exciting – all played by Ensemble Musikfabrik with impulsive momentum. Otto Tausk is determined and commanding stick. Van der Aa’s music takes a different style for the work’s scenes involving two singing roles: the unnamed father and daughter.

We meet them – the delicate and always sympathetic baritone Roderick Williams and soprano Julia BullockAt the top of its silvery spectrum, it’s equally comfortable in pop directness and lush lyricism – once loaded, without its knowledge. Their interactions feature the natural rhythmic vocal writings of Janacek or Debussy. Left alone, he tends to be accompanied by more traditional sounds like piano or strings, while his father’s musical vocabulary is definitively, irreversibly electronic.



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