Posts Tagged Art
The smells of NY
Think you know what NY smells like in summer? Where do you suppose you are if what you’re smelling is laundry, beer, juniper and hair wax? If you can’t get to NY yourself to figure it out, try using this smell map of NY from a recent NY Times.
Author and illustrator Jason Logan tackles the regions of Manhattan the way a biologist might document life in various micro climates. One smell at a time.
Link: New York Times
Add comment September 4, 2009
NYC hosts surreal, scented environment
Giant nylon stockings filled with aromatic spices are hanging from the ceiling of NYC’s Park Avenue Armory. The scented socks are part of “Anthropodino,” a surreal, psychedelic, earthy environment created by Brazilian artist Ernesto Neto. Experience it through June 14 at the Park Avenue Armory at 67th Street; (212) 616-3930, armoryonpark.org.
Read more at the New York Times.
3 comments May 16, 2009
Ambient scenting gets smart
Imagine if your ambient scenting machine had multiple possible scents, could learn to associate a scent with an event by observing how you interact with information sources, and based on its learning it would emit particular scents at relevant times during the day. Industrial designer David Sweeney (Royal College of Art) has designed something like this, which he’s calling “Quale.” Emitters that are best described as a Seuss-like cross between a chemistry beaker and a loudspeaker would be placed around the room like speakers in a kind of “surround smell” fashion. It’s unclear to me how the learning takes place to let the device know what scents to emit and when, but the fact that Sissel Tolaas designed the scents makes me think this device is worth a closer look.
Read more at Yanko Design or David Sweeney’s web site
1 comment November 29, 2008
Art exhibit gives an experience of history through smell
Reg Vardy Gallery in Sunderland, England recently hosted a fascinating scent art exhibit called “If There Ever Was: an exhibition of extinct and impossible smells.” The exhibit, put together by conceptual artist Robert Blackson, considered scent as “integral to the perception of abstraction and representation.” The scents created for the exhibit were inspired by their absence: we would never, ever otherwise be smelling them because they don’t exist. For example, the scents of four extinct flowering plants were created based on mixing aromas of their existing relatives with historical reports of how the extinct flowers smelled. Other scents in the exhibit included the surface of the Sun (created by heating various metals known to be part of the sun), communism, Hiroshima, “surrender” (did you know incense was once burned in the middle east to indicate surrender to an advancing army?), the Titanic, the Russian space station Mir, the last meal of a man who was executed in 1990, and more.
Fortunately for those of us who couldn’t be there, all of the “extinct and impossible” scents from the exhibit have been reproduced in a book, pictured above.
Participating artists included Kóan Jeff Baysa, Mark Buxton, Bertrand Duchaufour, Christoph Hornetz, Christophe Laudamiel, Patricia Millns, Steven Pearce, David Pybus – Scents of Time, Geza Schön, Sissel Tolaas, and Maki Ueda.
Read more at the Reg Vardy Gallery’s web site
Buy the book from Word Power Books
Add comment September 5, 2008
Philadelphia exhibit highlights olfactory art
Philadelphia’s Ester M. Klein art gallery is the temporary home to an olfactory art exhibit about scent.
“Odor Limits,” co-presented by the Monell Center and the University City’s Science Center, explores the potential of smell in aesthetic experience, using scents to delve into “pressing, contemporary themes about cultural difference, personal identity, spirituality, and the body.” Artists include Oswaldo Maciá (London), Jenny Marketou (Athens/New York), Chrysanne Stathacos (Toronto/New York), and Clara Ursitti (Glasgow).
The exhibit is free to the public, and will be at the Esther M. Klein Gallery through June 28, 2008.
Related Links:
Add comment May 24, 2008
MoMA exhibit includes smell artist James Auger
A current exhibit at New York’s Museum of Modern Art has some interesting work regarding smell by British artist James Auger. The New York Times highlighted Auger’s piece. “Smell +” in a recent article about the show “Science and the Elastic Mind.” Auger created a device that would allow people to smell each other before they actually met, like an olfactory blind dating service. The point Auger makes highlights the importance of the sense of smell and the fact that it’s been diminished in our culture. The exhibit runs through May 12, 2008.
From Auger’s web site at the Royal College of Art:
Smell has been until recently a neglected sense.
The current low status of smell is a result of the revaluation of the senses by philosophers and scientists of the 18th and 19th centuries. Smell was considered lower order, primitive, savage and bestial. Smell is the one sense where control is lost, each intake of breath sends loaded air molecules over the receptors in the nose and in turn potentially gutteral, uncensored information to the brain.
At the same time our bodies are emitting, loading the air around us and effecting others in ways we are only now starting to understand.
This project explores the human experiential potential of the sense of smell, applying contemporary scientific research in a range of domestic and social contexts.
Related Links:
- Where Science and Design Collide, a Few Weird Sights to Behold, in the NYTimes
- James Auger’s site at the Royal College of Art
- An article about Auger’s smell-related project at ScintillateMe.com
- The Museum of Modern Art, NYC
2 comments April 1, 2008
Chandler Burr’s Scent Dinners tour Europe
Chandler Burr, author and New York Times perfume critic, is offering a new series of Scent Dinners this June. The dinners involve discussing culinary perfumes, sampling them, and eating a gourmet meal that uses them or relates to them somehow. Burr collaborates with chefs in bringing together taste, scent, history and art. If you think you might be in Paris, Rome or Florence this June, I suggest you make your reservations now.
Read more at Perfume Shrine and TravelVideo.TV
Add comment March 20, 2008
