Summary

Image de la couverture du numéro Esse 116 Immersion

116

Immersion

Winter 2026

This issue is interested in all forms of immersion in contemporary art. How are artists critically engaging with immersive technologies? Conversely, what kinds of practices are challenging technology in their pursuit of immersion? How are these experiences breaking down the boundaries between spectator, body, and art? We put forward proposals that rely on listening and sustained attention rather than on amplification and sensory overload – works using devices that are sometimes relatively simple and non-invasive, sometimes a little more elaborate, but in which participation is, with a few nuances, neither passive nor devoid of critical thinking.

Cover: doux soft club
bleu de lieu, 2023-2024.
Photo: Cléo Sjölander, courtesy of the artists

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Current Issue

Crip

Spring Summer 2026

While “handi” (short for the term “handicapé” in French) and “crip” (derived from “cripple,” meaning “disabled”) are diminutive forms of stigmatizing terms, the meaning we ascribe to them is by no means reductive. On the contrary, they carry a political weight that provides those who embrace them with a powerful tool for empowerment, offering disabled artists non-normative ways for articulating the strange temporalities of disabled experience and alternative ways for navigating an ableist art world. In this issue, we are interested precisely in this work of social, political, and cultural transformation, and we focus on the ways in which crip authors and artists address the different challenges they face.

Cover: Hac Vinent
Accident, exhibition view, Fundació Joan Miró, Barcelona, 2024.
Photo: Roberto Ruiz, courtesy of the artist & ADN Galeria, Barcelona

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