The Creators Project: Inhaling through my nose, the artificial scent of honey and apricots fills my head. I stand on the second floor of Queens' Museum of the Moving Image reading a multisensory remix of Goldilocks and the Three Bears: The Smelly Version. MoMI is hosting Future of Storytelling's new exhibit, Sensory Stories, an amalgam of immersive artworks from creators like Chris Milk, Vincent Morisset, and Google Creative Lab, spanning virtual reality, experimental film, interface design, gaming, and other delightfully wacky ideas (like a children's book that can shoot delicious scents directly into your face) and I am in the center of it.
6 comments:
This is my favorite thing to tell people: I have almost no sense of smell… It mostly surprises people because they don’t understand what it’s like to go through life not smelling anything. For 18 years, I never knew that people’s houses smelled differently, or different rooms had aromas. The concept that indoors and outdoors both had a sense that I could never experience confused me, but I have never really been phased by it. My thought is that I’m missing out on something that I will never have, and so why bother worrying about it? Now that more and more art exhibits are using the sense of smell, I feel slightly left out. I wish that I could experience what it’s like to smell something, close my eyes, and imagine a story going along with the sense. It’s still not a big deal to me; I can see; I can touch; it’s just interesting to see how art is become more sensory in a way that I will never be able to experience.
I am such a fan of this technique for story telling. Isolating the senses so you need to rely on one is such a great way to get the audience involve and more interested in the the experience. It's probably not preferred, but it is definitely and artist and new way immersing yourself in a story. And idea I would like to do in the future is a sound isolation experience where the whole story is shown through sound and not the any of the other sense. And I think this may happen in the future for playground, or even a self piece with a theaters from my home town. But no matter where it is, it's a project I definitely want to experiment with and make into a crazy experience. I wish I could go to a museum or even that had this kind of storytelling because I am so fascinated by this process.
Incredible! I love the fact that entertainment is encompassing so many of the senses these days, especially since smell is so memory-evocative. I've always been very attached to the smell of things because I have a very strong sense of memory that comes with it. The other day I swore it was the beginning of field hockey preseason when I smelled the grass in the air, and something about the smell of my dorm hallway last week made me feel like it was our first day living there again. I think this could definitely be incredibly successful, and also a very cool opportunity to give a different experience to each person, since they will likely have their own memories to go along with what they smell. We talk a lot in design about semiotics and how our past knowledge influences the way we see the world and therefore performances. I think this is definitely a case where human experience will affect the way the exhibit is received. I can't wait to see how this idea develops and what other senses people attempt to isolate for audience experience.
I think Smell-o-Vision is an amazing idea and would be a great technological and story-telling advancement in society. I remember being very little on my family trip to Disney (all trips had to happen when I was very little due to the fact that my sister is 12 years older than I) and going to animal kingdom to see a 3D live-action “A Bug’s Life”. Being one of my favorite movies, I was an over-excited child sitting in the theatre and the experience I have still sticks with the today. The whole idea of the show is that it’s your average 3D movie (maybe it was shorter and more theatrical) and so you had on the fancy glasses and sat in your seat watching the screen. But the best part was a stink bug flew up into your face and hovered there for a moment before turning around and spraying you with a smelly, wet mist. It was revolting, but so exciting! Not only because the image of the stink bug’s mist was so invasive, but they actually sprayed you from a tube in the chair in front of you with a smelly solution, getting all the senses involved. Obviously, this experience was so effective I remember it today and I can’t wait to see if more people get to experience a story like I did. (They also handed out scratch and sniff cards with the main scents from the show afterwards)
This is one of the coolest things I’ve seen and the level of innovation that’s going into this project astounds me. The brain power going into this is enough to power the eastern sea board!! I love the idea of smell o visions, especially since I’ve only seen it in cartoons; it brings about certain whimsicalness that you being to miss in the “real world” though I can see why they are marketing it to children. I don’t really know if it will do exactly what they want with the better eating habits ideas because then they’d have to get it individual houses. But the museum representation they have is really cool; I also like the listen to story, where the woman is holding her ear to the wall. Sensory inclusion I think is incredibly important to any story; we’ve even worked a similar scent story into our arcade project. I’m glad to see it has real world applications.
I have experienced something similar to this at the Museum of science in Boston, Massachusetts. There was a room with a bunch of biomes in them. Different stuffed animals surrounded by fake plants all set up behind glass. There would be a little panel in front of each biome which had buttons that showed each species, played sounds from the biome and, most importantly, had a little button that released smells from the environment. Now, in theory, as the article expresses, this idea seems to be a good one. But it has to be executed very very well. For the most part all of the smells that I experienced were pretty much the same foul smell of dirt. I think storytelling through smell is a great idea. But it needs to have a much higher level of finish than any visual or auditory storytelling form would.
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