Raewyn Turner

Announcing March 2010 YASMIN discussion: Multisensory Perception
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We are perceiving the world with all our senses; In visual media we've become mesmerised by the vibrancy of saturated coloured light, it reminds us of the colours of the hypnagogic fireworks in our minds. Ipods and MP3 players allow singular insular worlds of sound, which have become a personal soundtrack to real life instead of its own sound. Our sense of smell is informed by a synthetic overlay of fragrance in our personal space, the larger environment is re-perfumed with substitutes for the smells of nature and we make new associations with smells never before encountered.

How do these combined nuances of mediated sensing feel under our skins? What would a synthetic smell receptor be able to sense in 2020? and what are the consequences of being able to smell more-are we numbed to most of the fragrance of our time? Although we seem to be 'anosmic?'?.. (the term for a lack of sense of smell) to most of the fragrance of our time, odour signals are being transmitted, received, translated and associated by all living beings in nature. Could we grow an awareness of the full cross-sensory fragrance of life? These are some of the questions we would like to discuss in the coming weeks.

Our first venue for discussing these issues was through a public theatre/laboratory we constructed called 'Crossing Wires' which ran over three weeks during November 2009 in a downtown storefront in Auckland, New Zealand. The installation was both a working laboratory and a performative spacewhich provided us with an alternative venue to develop our dialogue on cultural, social and temporal constructions of olfactory sensing, building a relationship between the languages of science and art. Human smells were collected and processed, and passers-by were invited to experience, the smells and engage in dialogue. The lab was the 1st step towards collecting, categorising and coding of the human plume. For more detail see our blogsite for the installation (www.crossingwireslab.tumblr.com)

Our respondents: Jenny Marketou, Hilda Kozari, Sergio Basbaum and Ian Ferguson will join this discussion.