Noseum
The Noseum is the first installation in what will eventually become an entire museum dedicated to fragrances. As humans, we have used scent for thousands of years to convey and affect complex social intentions. And while we have dedicated museums to traditional visual art and a growing base of fragrance artists, there is yet to be a large, dedicated space for people to experience fragrance art.
We’ll also be showing a directory of olfactory artists so you can continue your journey through sm-eaven (smell-heaven). See them around the country and the world to experience fantastic and varied fragrance installations.
Have you ever experienced a smell and instantly been transported to a memory? In this piece, we explore the connection between fragrance and visual color. As the fragrances waft towards you, close your eyes and share which color the fragrance most reminds you of. Then add your color to the colors from other attendees, and all together it creates a unique color that is crowd-sourced to represent each fragrance.
In a second exhibit, you can experience natural fragrances produced by the world of microorganisms. Many of the scents we experience in day-to-day life are derived from petroleum or extracted from nature. This is part of a movement to create natural fragrances using fermentation.
About the Artist | Ben Ember
This is Ben Ember’s first exhibit as an artist. Throughout his life he has explored art through ceramics, dance, and charcoal, and for the past year has been dipping his nose into the world of fragrance. His work is influenced by living in Kenya for 6 years and significant global travel, where he’s experienced art from around the world.
Ben is also a climate-focused entrepreneur with a team based in Cambridge. His company, Wild Microbes, is using microorganisms to create natural replacements for chemicals made from petroleum. They find bacteria hiding in different biomes around the world and use their evolutionary abilities as a starting point, including those which make natural fragrances!
Odor Organ
The Odor Organ is a compact diffusion device that delivers odor notes in synchronicity to music keys; it allows you to play scents instead of sounds
As a society, we favor sight and often ignore this rich olfactory information. Although not everyone is, humans evolved to be capable of perceiving and communicating this information.
Being able to have a more acute understanding of smell will allot us a more clear understanding of our surroundings, our environment, our bodies, our health, our memory formation and recall. Scent can tell you about the genetics of those around you, the species in your local ecosystem, about disease and danger; it holds the traditions and foods of a culture.
There is a longstanding parallel between scent and sound; it is present in the temporal quality, in the subjective nature, and even in the language used to describe scent. Using this parallel and building off of historical instances and theoretical examples of such a device, M Dougherty built the Odor Organ to invite people to play and learn for themselves about scent. Play provides such a fun, joyful, low friction access point into learning, specifically with complex ideas like olfaction.
The device was initially prototyped as part of the artists’ thesis project for their M.S. In Interactive Media Arts from NYU Tisch. Since then, the device has gone through many iterations.
The Odor Organ on display, the most recent version, was produced with the following collaborations:
Created with scientific engineer, Dan Gross
Materials provided by International Flavors and Fragrances Inc. with assistance from Travis Aikman
Accords composed by perfumer, George Tedder
About the Artist | M Dougherty
M Dougherty is a nonbinary, multidisciplinary artist and researcher. With a rich background in many fields, they have shifted focus toward both scientific research and work which uses art to explore the output of research.
Raised in Los Angeles, in an epicenter of experimental olfaction, they often use scent to explore communication, memory, and interaction throughout their work.
Equipped with a BA in Fine Arts from the USC and a Master’s in Interactive Media Arts from NYU Shanghai, M moves fluidly between artistic mediums in an attempt to better study the juxtaposition of technology and humanity.
Their artistic practice originated in sculpture so consistently involves installation, and personal interaction through the senses. This manifests in explorations of biomaterials, chemo-sensory information, and the design of wearable technologies that enhance humans’ relationship to scent.
They have exhibited in both group and solo shows in such places as Olfactory Art Keller and the François Ghebaly Gallery.
Adnose
The multimedia artist Adnan Aga was born without a sense of smell and has never experienced what others described to him as the superpower of being transported through time and space by volatile molecules entering his nose. His installation Adnose is an experimental prosthetic device in the shape of a wall-mounted nose which uses Computer Vision and OpenAI's most advanced system, GPT-4, to predict the smell of any object presented to it. If an object is presented to one of Adnose's nostrils, the other nostril prints out the description of the object's smell.
Adnose serves not only as Adnan's nose, but as the nose of all members of the anosmic community, who constantly wonder what the things around them smell like. The artist hopes that his project will draw attention to the often-neglected sense of smell and to the challenges faced by those who can't smell.
Adnose will be introduced through a Smell-and-Tell event on Sunday, April 30th from 4 to 6pm. Visitors are encouraged to bring their favorite, or most interesting, or smelliest object to the gallery to challenge Adnose to create a description of its smell. After April 30th, Adnose will continue to be available to predict the smells of objects during regular opening hours in the gallery's Cubiculum Odoratus.
About The Artist | Adnan Aga
Adnan Aga is a Dubai-born multimedia artist based in New York City.
Aga’s work in the field of creative technology and experiential design includes a variety of dynamic and unique projects from building giant gumball machines to musical soap dispensers to password protected cookie jars. His professional and artistic practices focus on designing and developing interactive experiences that explore the whimsical and downright comical areas of our lives.
He merges cultural touchpoints and technology to create installations, wearables, software programs, and digital products that subvert our expectations of the role of sensory performance and information in daily life.
Currently, Aga is developing a series around the physical experience of anosmia, the absence of the ability to smell, in an attempt to create empathy around smell-related disabilities/sensitivities by reprogramming our everyday sensory experiences. OR through the reprogramming of our everyday sensory experiences.
Adnan has a B.S in Mechanical Engineering from the University of Pittsburgh, and will complete his M.P.S at the Interactive Telecommunications Programme at NYU Tisch in May 2023.