Untitled (2008)
For this installation I chose smells about the locality of Chicago based on interviews I conducted with long term Chicago residents. I interfaced the smells with some of these interviews abstract (to give some context to the scents) with an EZIO board. The visitors’ movements were tracked by small c-mos cameras looking down at the area around each smell diffuser. Depending on where the visitor was he would trigger the smell diffuser and one of the two or three sound tracks associated to each diffusers. In other words, by moving around the diffuser he/she would go through two or three short sound tracks. These tracks were composed by Paul Schutte, based on olfactory interviews I had with long term (15 years or more) Chicago residents. The scents were supplied by Michel Roudnitska from Art-et-Parfum. This was coded in processing (processing.org). The diffusers were disseminated over the entire gallery floor, trespassing curatorial boundaries, challenging territorial ownership, pretty much the way scents and sound behave. This constituted my MFA exhibition at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.
For a collateral version of this work into NetArt, go here and click on “Scensing Histories”