imaginetic

By: crazykaro

May 22 2010

Tags: artist, artwork, box, gaze, hole, installation, pipilotti rist, senses, smell, touch, vision

Category: Just Words

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For the last assignment for our Imaging Culture class we are going to have a little exhibition with artworks from everyone in our class, in the Drama Theatre (G07), Griffith University Gold Coast Campus, on June 1st between 12 and 2pm.

I was thinking about what I wanted to do for my artwork, and while the actual content was just a blurry idea in the beginning, I knew I wanted a multisensual artwork/installation. I was always very impressed and enchanted by art, cultural events or museums that engaged not just our sense of vision and hearing, but tried to address the other, more neglected senses as well (mainly smell and touch, as taste is usualy difficult to realize for a large amount of visitors). In Nürnberg, Germany, there is a little museum called Tower of Senses, that focuses on our senses, how they work, and how we can be deceived by them. In the close-by town Erlangen, there was once a similar thing, where you could take your shoes off and wander in total darkness, just relying on your sense of touch and hearing. In Futurama, an animated TV series by Matt Groening (The Simpsons), there is a scientific device that is called the smelloscope, which looks like a giant telescope, but instead of seeing distant objects in space, oe can smell them, as every planet or star has a unique smell.

I’m also very impressed by artists who turn passive looking into an active gaze, like Pipilotti Rist. Selfless in the Bath of Lava was one of her installations, where through a tiny hole in the floor of the art gallery you could see her naked in a sea of lava, struggling and looking up to the visitor.

So what I’m planing for my artwork is a small installation, consisting of three seperate boxes. In each box, there is one hole to look through, and another one to smell objects in the same box. The screen where short movies are playing in a loop will not cover the whole bottom of the box, but only a small part, to some extent hidden by objects lying on the screen that fit the theme of the video. I initially wanted to display different types of homes in every box (like a Bavaria box, an Austria box, an Australian box), but due to the fact that right now I have only access to one of the three, I decided to focus on different aspects that strike me about Australia, and what are now the most intense aspects of this culture that stand out in my perspective. So one box will be dedicated to the beach culture, one to the car culture and one to the very dominant Geselligkeit and party culture. The boxes will be painted white, the cables of the laptops and the table where they rest on will hopefully be hidden by a black drapery or curtain. Each hole in the boxes will have an arrow and either an eye or a nose painted next to it. Maybe there will be the possibility to use three pairs of headphones as well for each box, so people can choose wich senses they want to trigger or even mix up the sounds and the videos/smell in the different boxes. Or instead of three boxes, there could be six, with the smell, the video and the audio in a different box, so that the visitors have to figure out for themselves what smell corresponds to a certain video and sound.

The title of the artwork is going to be: Smell-O-Stralia.