Making art from smell: the peculiar and wonderful Osmodrama
Website: https://osmodrama.com/
Smell is an underrated sense. It’s often relegated in the hierarchy of senses to the bottom rung, but it’s only when people lose it – temporarily or permanently – that they recognize how important it is. Part of this is because it is difficult to determine the object that smell focuses on. If a banana has the smell, it is not the banana that is the object being smelled, but the volatile chemicals that contribute to the smell of ‘banana’, which are floating in the air. And when it comes to art, we accept pictures, we accept music, but we neglect taste and smell.
There is, however, a very interesting project coming out of Germany that puts smell into the art space in a rather brilliant and intriguing way. It’s called Osmodrama, and it has been created by Wolfgang Georgsdorf (pictured above). His idea was to make an olfactory organ, and then load it with a bunch of smells, and play them using a keyboard, to create a smell story or drama, hence the name Osmodrama.
I caught up with Wolfgang, as well as Chris Kelly from AbScent (a charity helping people with smell loss) and Professor Barry Smith (a philosopher who is researching the perception of taste and smell) to hear more about this project. This is an edited version of our conversation.
Chris Kelly: Together we were at a conference in Germany on smell dysfunction, with Thomas Hummel. The cherry on the cake of this event was a visit to the Osmodrama, which was set up and running. Barry and I sat in the audience both of us equally bewitched by what we were experiencing, and as we left we said we must get something like this to come to London.
Wolfgang Georgsdorf: You can play on the midi keyboard like an organist, and play scores with chords and subchords. You can internet transmit. You can program for hours. The program we are mostly using now sound recording and sound processing software because of the timeline is to overlap and sample.
Jamie Goode: What is the latency of a smell?
Wolfgang: 5 seconds.
Jamie: then how long does it take to go?
Barry Smith: That’s what’s really impressive, because it is a pressurized tent and it is sucking the air out the back. So the smells are moving past you.
Jamie: this looks insanely good.
Barry: it is insanely good.
Wolfgang: It works better than it looks. The beauty deceives.
Barry: I had my fears as to whether it was going to be as good as I had read, and I was expecting. You sit there, and an odour comes to you. You don’t have to adjust your breathing. You are breathing in the odour and then there is a very clean transmission to the next odour so you don’t feel a gap or any mixing. It goes one, then the next, then the next. As you sit there breathing normally, you are just getting an odour, then an odour, then an odour. The piece I saw was Autocomplete Evolution in 12 minutes. You started off with earthy, boggy, swamp, marsh smells. Then you start to smell vegetation, then you start to smell fruit, and then you get animals, then you get humans. And towards the end you are getting industrial smells.
Jamie: So it is a story told by smell
Wolfgang: We are talking about a story telling machine. A medium, like cinema projector, camera, or a harp or an organ for time-based art of story telling. Entering semantic spaces because it does matter what you smell before and what you smell after. Every impression is always coined by the preceding expression. If I come here and I got a fist in the face before I would be a different man here, probably with different words.
Barry: The articulation is so good and that is the thing that impresses me. You don’t feel it go; it just suddenly becomes a clearly articulated odour.
Wolfgang: I still want to describe for Jamie how it affects you. You sit in there, and it’s a collective experience with 120 people. It’s a concert; it’s music for the nose, or a theatre for the nose.
Jamie: One question that is bugging me is this. Our perception is crossmodal, and it is a unity. Are you co-presenting the smells with other sensory stimuli?
Wolfgang: Of course, we will come to that. First of all we talk about the pure synosmy, as opposed to the symphony. It’s smell so new words had to be found to talk about this machine, so we have the synosmy. We have the whiffmouth. We don’t have the audience, we have the odience. And we have smelodies as little elements of synosmies. We need these words. In the trade of sailing, for example, you have a whole dictionary of words no one would understand without being a sailor. Here we had to find a lot of new words to talk about parts of this organ. Osmodrome is the place where the osmodrama is happening.
Jamie: In the tradition of aesthetics the proximal senses have been regarded as lower in the hierarchy, and not a suitable subject for art. How do artists feel about moving towards olfaction as art?
Wolfgang: There is a book just released by a Harvard professor, Larry Shiner, called Art Scents, and he put my machine on the cover.
Barry: It’s regarded as lower and as not important, and yet artists have been straining to try to give us an art experience in smell. They usually do it very badly. You usually go in and there are little things on the wall that you have to lift up and smell. Or there’s something you have to scratch and smell. Or, it’s the bombardment of a whole room, where you can’t get rid of the odour.
Wolfgang: Or it is conceptual art, where someone puts a trash bag into the corner of a gallery and writes Chanel No. 5 on it.
Barry: I know you have done crossmodal stuff, but I wanted to just sit there and close my eyes and experience the pure smells.
Jamie: It would be fun to do it in the dark.
Wolfgang: You can. You have to. You should. In the stillness and the dark.
Jamie: Although in the real world our experience of aroma is almost always with context, with other sensory stimuli at the same time.
Barry: I think aesthetics is that experience where we pretend to ourselves that we are just using one sense. When you go into a gallery you want no noise, and you want to just stare at the painting. You go into concerts and you see people closing their eyes because they just want to hear the music. I think you try to pay attention to one sense. I think this is the purest form of olfaction.
Jamie: In the real world we are rarely smelling a single chemical entity. Olfaction works by learning to recognize mixtures. If you think about walking through a crowded marketplace, the air has many odours in it yet we are able to parse out and recognize groupings of them that fit, for example, our coded olfactory object of pizza. We say, there’s pizza over there. In the midst of a crowded olfactory environment. In the space between the receptor level and the perception level we are able to pick out groupings. And we have two nostrils, so is there a stereo effect, so is the brain using slight differences in timing, is there something going on with stereo olfaction that allows the brain to group molecules together?
Barry: There seems to be. The pattern thing is there, but the stereo thing is definitely there. What happens is that you switch around which nostril does the most sniffing. You have one that takes the strain for 30 minutes and then it relaxes and the other one takes the strain, so one nostril is always a little bit locked up in comparison to the other and then they swap around. It’s as if you were hearing better with your left side for a while and then you swapped to your right.
Jamie: I saw you had a keyboard with numbers on it. Is that delivering single odours or groups of odours? Do you pre blend?
Wolfgang: Not single odorants.
Jamie: So you pre-blend. You create a smell like a perfumer.
Wolfgang: Yes. And you can blend them and make more. There are many examples I can give. The idea was to build a universal olfactory paint box, with which you can paint pictures behind the eyes.
Jamie: So you are making an artist’s palette with smells.
Wolfgang: Yes, and the end of this long path is a synthesizer. It means you would have way more than 64 valves and source chambers in the device that I have now. There are 64 organ pipes that are places where you can put a component, to be blended with others live. We can control the amount of air and the duration, and the speed of the air, and humidity and temperature (but because these consume a lot of energy we mostly skip them, although it would be nice to have them). A horse smell can be altered with a little bit of hay, a little bit of spring. It can be altered to an elephant or a camel. The smell of beef can be altered into a body smell. Animal smells and body smells are very close together. You sit in the osmodrome and breathe normally, and every breath that you take you get a new smell. The smells don’t blur or linger.
Barry: That blew me away. I met Wolfgang, talked to him about it, and wanted to try it. But I approached this with a slight feeling of ‘is this going to disappoint me?’ My God, it delivered so well. You just sit there and breath. Each smell was distinct and there was nothing residual. This is pretty impressive.
Wolfgang: This was in another venue, in the Museum of Modern Art in Berlin, which was a smaller place, without the tent.
Jamie: Is this apparatus portable?
Wolfgang: You need two truck trains to carry it. We are trying to find out how we can bring this machine to London. I think it would be a great idea. It has never left Germany so far, and there is nothing like it. I thought we’d see the world flooded by these machines because you can do so many things with it. For science, commerce, technology, education and smell training, for art, for conjunction with other time based media such as cinema, dance and music.
Barry: We were talking to Tate as to whether they would be interested. They don’t have any money, but they are interested. Imagine this in the Turbine Hall, with a long stretched out tent, with cinema seats inside. People could have the pure experience of it as an art form, but we were thinking that perfume companies might want to rent this in the evening, or wine companies, or fashion companies. The Tate are very geared up to doing this. I want to do this for research, and Chris is very interested in this for smell training for people with hyposimia or recovering anosmics. There is the pure aesthetics of it. There are a number of different applications. For people in the wine trade interested in learning odours or learning mixtures, this idea of having the individual smells or combined smells and layering them, it would be a pretty nice thing. You want it to earn its keep in the evening so it can be free to people during the day.
Jamie: What palette of smells do you have at the moment, and do you do a lot of work with your materials to get literacy with them? Do you sit and think, this and this could work together and then try it? There is an infinite matrix of possibilities. Presumably you have to work like a perfumer, knowing that this will probably work here, and not this.
Wolfgang: It is a touch challenge to constrain myself. This is the beginning of a semester. It is an introduction to an endless discussion. I work with a perfumer in the lab, and for several weeks we worked on ideas like ‘what is a horse?’ His brand is Ecsentric Molecules, and his first hit was 01, and now he is in business. He lived for 14 years in London and now he is back in Berlin. I worked with him and we figured out the recipes for certain smells. They are artificial smells because if you have a natural smell, after a few hours it is perishing. We have to synthesize them. I wanted to create a universal paintbox of smells with which to paint the world. We needed something with which we could portray as much of human life as possible. So I thought of the evolution of the earth: of bogs and swamps.
Jamie Has anyone attempted a classification of synthetics? If you think about a perfumer’s palette they have the natural ingredients and they know what they give. If you are starting with molecules, this is hard.
Wolfgang: At the end of the process we might have a synthesizer, and a synthesizer works with single molecules. 10% of the molecules we know are volatile, and only these are in play. And not even all volatiles have a smell. They need to be lighter than air. They need to fly to our nose. So far we are not at the synthesizer level. We are adding smells together to create, for example, earthy notes and water notes, resins, fruits, animals and so on.
