Essex Olivares: Incorporate
Published by:
- iOSApp, SculptureCenter, 2014
- Digital, Self-released, 2022
Featured Media
Description
Originally released by Essex Olivares (Eve Essex & Juan Antonio Olivares) in 2014 as an iPhone app, commissioned by SculptureCenter for the exhibition "In Practice: Chance Motives." Reissued digitally on Bandcamp in 2022. When installed on a mobile handheld device – common to commuters, teenagers, urban subjects, emerging artists, wage laborers, freelance intellectuals and still other persistent producers of digital communication – this objective-free guided meditation encourages its users to practice self-reflection through a series of specially tailored activities intended to reestablish (or rather, generate) tangible connections between an individual and his or her actual surroundings. Posing questions that cannot be earnestly answered by algorithm or automated machine (Are you feeling irritable? . . . lonely? . . . disoriented?) Essex Olivares’s unproductive and therapeutically uncertified script for overcoming Cartesian dualism promotes uncomfortable interactions that stimulate internal balance by ultimately dissolving the solipsism of contemporary life – via the selfsame social media channels that valorize consumer satisfaction through instant (and only ever temporary) gratification. — Kari Rittenbach