[smell and art] the course

I have always been fascinated by smell, and ever since I was 14 or something I started to realise that one of my strange behaviours was that I like to smell stuff. My favourite smell at that time (and even until now) are (among others): the pages of Wordsworth classic novels, warm video (VHS) tapes, and varnished furnitures. And so after more than a decade later, I was excited that there was a course from Art Science program which I could enrol bearing the title: Smell and Art. The course ran for a mere 3 weeks, but it was 3 days a week so I received a lot of knowledge (and enlightenment) about the nice world of smell. The teacher, Maki Ueda is a Japanese artist who currently lives in Rotterdam. She started the olfactory art in 2004 when she was pregnant and she got really sensitive to smell. She visited Indonesia once to exhibit her work (not yet olfactory art thou) and there (in Bandung to be exact) she learnt that the warm temperature and humidity of the archipelago produced a lot of smell because the particles of the objects vapoured easily in that kind of climate.

During the course we were taught to extract smell and preserve it either using oil or alcohol (we used vodka). We also learnt to make incense and how to use them like in a Japanese tea party (kodo). I didn’t really have much time to blog at that time (the couse was in February, so that means 3 months ago), but luckily Maki kept a blog for the course (in which all the students could contribute) here.

filtering the smell (oil based)

making incense

smell bottles

For the final assignment, we were asked to make a smell game. At first it was quite difficult for me to develop a game in the scope of a sense of smell. Frankly I am a really visual person, and it is really difficult to express myself in other forms of art. But anyway, during a brief brainstorming with Maarten I suddenly got the idea of making this sort of a tracking game, with various smells from Indonesian traditional market.

my sketch of the smell project (photo by maki)

For the game I made (extracted) a total of 16 smells.

18 bottles in total, 16 to use, 2 for spares

more photos can be found here