EXPERIMENTAL SCENT SUMMIT
 

The IAO teams up with artist Klara Ravat for the second year annual Experimental Scent Summit, where over the course of two full days attendees will share an exciting schedule of talks, round tables, breakout discussions and workshops relating to experimental practices with scent. A relaxed, non-competitive and conversational meeting of olfactory artists, the Experimental Scent Summit is an opportunity for participants to share their work - and to openly discuss the challenges of working with scent in an unrestrained, like-minded environment.

The Experimental Scent Summit is made possible by Smell Lab, The Swedenborg Society, the Institute for Art and Olfaction, and the Art and Olfaction Awards.

Date: April 18 + 19, 2018
Time: 10am – 6pm, both days
Location: The Swedenborg Society (20 Bloomsbury Way, London WC1A 2TH)

+ Day 1 Photoset: Click here
+ Day 2 Photoset: Click here

 

DAY 1 SCHEDULE
18 April, 2018

10:00 - Introduction
with Klara Ravat, Saskia Wilson-Brown

10:15 - Olfactory Art
with Klara Ravat
Klara Ravat will present a survey of her work, with an emphasis on public practice and olfactory art.

 

 

 

10:45 - Poison Perfume and Other Adventures in Conceptualizing Scent
with Miguel Matos
Miguel will discuss creating a three-part autobiography through scent with Sven Pritzkoleit (and accepting the sometimes unexpected results), discuss the choices one must face when doing creative direction on non-figurative scents, and explore the pleasant intoxications of working with "poisonous" scents with Christian Carbonnel.

11:15 - The Library of Smell
with Hisako Inoue
In this talk, Hisako Inoue explores the parallels between the course of a human life and that of a book. Analyzing books for Odor compounds helps us focus on the diversity of human behavior and imagination, could be used to design communication for blind or differently abled people, and could create opportunities for a wide variety of verbal expressions and a new world view.

 

11:45 - In conversation with The Candy Perfume Boy
with Eddie Bulliqi and Thomas Dunckley
Journalist Eddie Bulliqi will interview perfume critic Thomas Dunckley (aka The Candy Perfume Boy) about how the expanding field of experimental scent (encompassing scent profiles, applications, and contexts) is changing the way he thinks and writes about the medium.

 

12:30 - Lunch Break

 

13:30 - The Olfactory project at "Museum of All and Everyone"
with Laimė Kiškūnė
Artist Laimė Kiškūnė will discuss her study of human olfaction in interaction with the City as a live organism at a museum in St. Petersburg, Russia, and how the exposition of the smells of the city's modernity was born through real olfactory research.

14:00 - Olfactory design for healthier food intake
with Thijs Elich + Renske van Vroonhoven
Thijs Elich and Renske van Vroonhoven from Attic Lab teamed up with behavioral scientist Renske Bongers to stimulate people to make healthier food choices with the help of odors. In close cooperation with universities the three will launch a longterm pilot that implements scent specific priming in a practical way in order to improve public health.


14:30 - Vantaa Black Sense and the Smell of Peatland
with Hilda Kozári, and Léda Vesmanen
Helsinki-based visual artist Hilda Kozári will explore her artistic focus on multisensory art; olfactory and visual perception and new paths of participatory art and accessibility for visual impaired. She will also discuss her artwork is AIR, Smell of Helsinki, Budapest and Paris (2003).

 

15:00 - Break

 

15:30 - A Guide to Creating Uncomfortable Questions
with Oswaldo Maciá
Oswaldo Maciá investigates how our nose can lead us to ideas that our eyes cannot see, discussing the possibility of a sculpture that goes beyond an ocular-centric world. How can we open possibilities for different registers of perception? How can we create uncomfortable questions, pay attention to what we do not know, destabilise the givens of our times?

16:00 - Sharing Olfactory Experiences
with Boris Raux
Through examples taken from his practice, Raux explores how smells deal with the common and the singular, inner references and values of the other, pushing Relational Aesthetic logic forward by creating a wonderful prelude to the sharing of a hand-in-hand culture.

16:30 - The Nose onstage: Olfactory Perspectives for Theatrical Work
with Dr. Anna D'Errico
Dr. D'Errico analyzes the use of odors, and odor perception, in the performance space (dance and theater mainly) and examine how smell can be included in both the space of the spectator and the actor.

17:00 - Embodied Scents
with Aiste Kriukelyte, Jurga Katakinaite-J., Reda Valentinaviciene (Hortus Apertus)
What if you meet a scent as a virtual actor and let yourself interact with it as a dance partner? Embodied Scents Patterns (ESP) are expressions of scents by body movements and poses. Hortus apertus invite to become a part of the experimentalizing process and try your own ESP creation.

 

 

DAY 2 SCHEDULE
19 April, 2018

10:00 - Introduction
with Klara Ravat, Saskia Wilson-Brown

 

10:15 - Are there olfactory illusions? Why does it matter?
with Harry Sherwood
This talk explores the ways in which we can be wrong when smelling, focusing on the role that the existence (or not) of illusions and hallucinations play in deciding which perceptual theory is best and inviting the audience to participate in testing some olfactory illusions.

10:45 - Sex, Sabotage, and Scent: A Table Read
with Sarah Baker and Orlando Seale
Join Baker and a cast of six actors for some dark comic relief as they read a scene from her National Theatre Studio performance piece, Rocco Rosso Riche (2013). Inspired by 1980’s nighttime soap operas, Baker wrote and directed a tale of a scheming heiress and fashion CEO whose new perfume line is being sabotaged by the vengeful ghost of her murdered husband.

11:15 - Altered States: Transcendence and the Uncanny
with Christopher Gordon
Through an examination of fragrance as disembodied presence, this talk explores the associations between transcendent states, absence and the uncanny, hypothesizing a link between creative practices and esoteric systems.

11:45 - Approaching "All Natural" Perfume Design as Form of Limited Palette Olfactory Art
with Dawn Spencer Hurwitz
Dawn Spencer Hurwitz explores limited palettes in olfaction, and how an all-natural practice can propel creativity in perfume and art.

 

 

12:30 - Lunch Break

 

13:30 - Luxure / Occire
with Maxwell Williams
Maxwell presents a scented audioplay of supernatural terror. Written by Maxwell Williams, starring the voices of Sarah Strunin, Maxwell Williams, Lainey Racah, Saskia Wilson-Brown, and Micah Hahn, and featuring scents by Sean Raspet and Maxwell Williams.

 

 

14:00  - The power of Scent. Scent in Context.
with Peter De Cupere
Olfactory artist Peter de Cupere talks about how olfaction can be used to add context and/or be the context of the work of art. In his lecture Peter de Cupere shares some works to illustrate possible uses of fragrances. How they are perceived and how they have impact on the spectators and media. He con cludes with some of his methodology and ideas to create olfactory art.

14:45 - Olfactory Games: Maki's Method
with Maki Ueda, Sunna Svavarsdottir, Lauren Jetty Howells-Green
In Maki Ueda's olfactory art course started in 2009 at Interfaculty ArtScience (Royal Academy of Art, The Hague), she makes a conceptual and abstract approach to medium of smell: What you smell is less important than the sense of smell itself. In this session, we'll explore this methodology by playing a couple of olfactory games, as a group.

 

15:30 - Break

 

16:00 - Scent Communication with Sound
with Daniel Sonabend
Daniel Sonabend is a London-based composer who specialises in creating music for scent. Amongst his latest commissions are Scent Constellation – an award winning installation for Le Grand Musée du Parfum (which included transforming 200 perfume ingredients and five perfume compositions into their musical equivalents) and Cartier’s first Unidentified Scent Object - Le Nuage Parfumé (The Perfumed Cloud).

 

 

16:30 - The Fantasy of the Oriental Fragrance
with Julianne Lee
The Oriental category is the fragrant arm of Orientalism, flattening colonized bodies into homogeneity, subjugated through desire and fetish. The fantasy of the sensual, feminized Orient persists through this day in perfume, while raw materials leave faint traces of history despite the marketing mythos. Can we let go of the colonial gaze in scent-making, and embrace the uncontrollable nature of smell, with its multiplicity of narratives?

 

 

17:00 - The Com(m)une Perfume
with Antonio Gardoni
In this session, Antonio will introduce a global collaborative project to establish an imaginary perfume company where different perfumers, critics, evaluators, producers, suppliers, distributors and retailers will join to create one and only fragrance. This will be the first call to start organizing the project and discuss its operational system.

 

 

17:30 - New Models for Ownership in Perfume
with Saskia Wilson-Brown
In this session, Saskia Wilson-Brown explores alternatives for intellectual property, explores efforts made in other fields, and introduces an upcoming year-long project exploring new structures for information sharing in the fragrance industry.

 

18:00 - END

 

2017 SUMMIT

The 2017 Experimental Scent Summit took place on May 5, 2017, at Silent Green Kulturquartier, Berlin. During a full nine hour session, we welcomed 50 experimental practitioners with scent, writers, artists and perfumers to participate and listen to their peers discussing challenges and new strategies for working with scent in an experimental capacity.This was the first summit produced for (and by) creative practitioners working with scent, invited participants will share their work and discuss their issues in an open and unrestrained environment, and was produced by Klara Ravat and Saskia Wilson-Brown. 

+ Learn more about the 2017 Summit

The Experimental Scent Summit is produced yearly as an ancillary program to The Art and Olfaction Awards. More information about the awards can be found here.