A video installation that glitches both visually and audibly whenever you try and smell it.
A clip of catfood which I’m pretty sure has a smell.
I was born with Anosmia, which means I can’t smell anything. And by anything I mean Anything. I haven’t been able to smell flowers, or food, or garbage, or people, or rain, or many of the other things that I wish I was able to. Some see this as a curse, some as a blessing (especially in New York). This is the first time I’ve made something that I feel like matches up with that feeling.
A video would play out personal and stock footage scenes of items that I believe have a smell in order of obviousness. For example - A flower would be very smelly while a 3D printer (I think) has a smell but I’m not sure.
The initial idea of a mic was (while effective at detecting a sniff) not the optimal method of interacting with the system. A new interaction mechanism was needed to achieve this effect which took me to the cotton jar.
An Arduino Nano 33 IoT was used to send OSC messages over wifi to Touchdesigner to trigger the distortion based on how close the user got to the jar.
The installation is made up of 2 pieces.
A touchdesigner file that would run the video. The touchdesigner file would have a switch that would swap out the video for the glitched out effect when the machine learning model was triggered. Touchdesigner would also play an audio track of a selection of music
A teachable machine learning model that detects the sound of sniffs.
Although this method would need to be trained in the right environment so I would rather change this to a distance sensor instead to get a more reliable reading.
Note about the below, it was really hard to ideate for this project but I started writing down my thoughts and didn’t really just want to delete them so I kept them below.
It makes me wonder what I was trying to create here with this installation. Did I want to convey a sense of business. Of routine ? This feels similar to a poster I made for 50 days of making. The one where I felt like I had too much going on.