Essex Olivares, Incorporate

An orchestrated ensemble of vocalists, acoustic and digital instrumentalists perform a live set of soothing yet invigorating musical selections excerpted from the original score of Essex Olivares’s smartphone application, Incorporate, for the launch event at SculptureCenter in February, 2014.

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



With Natalie Galpern & Darius Greyson, vocals; Eve Essex, saxophone & percussion; Nathan Hauenstein & Brendan Rielley, synthesizer; James Mercer, laptop; Max Zuckerman, guitar. Written by Eve Essex and Juan Antonio Olivares. Commissioned by SculptureCenter as part of "In Practice: Chance Motives."

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