There is nothing more natural, more constant and basic than our five senses. They define our reality, influencing how we feel, how we think, and how we live. In our modern age, there is such a brutal influx of technology that the senses, while always present, get muddled, confused and reconfigured until what we consider reality becomes a philosophical question without a truly defined answer. For the MIT List Visual Arts Center, reconciling the collision of natural senses and technology is of utmost concern.
"Sensorium: Embodied Experience, Technology, and Contemporary Art" is a two part exhibition featuring the work of artists interested in the connection between technological advances and the way we view human senses. The title comes from the Latin term, "sensorium," that has to do with historical theories on the relation of the mind and the body, and the longstanding debate on humanity versus artificiality. Including art by Mathieu Briand, Sissel Tolaas, Janet Cardiff and Georges Bures Miller, Ryoji Ikeda, and Bruce Nauman, the works are primarily interactive, involving not just the viewer, but the hearer, the feeler, and the smeller as well.
One of the curators, Bill Arning, explained the goal of the exhibit at a gallery tour last Saturday, "We started looking at how technology has affected the five senses. We thought it was better to not try to illustrate this, but to have more experiential works, so as to use senses, not just theorize about them."
Stepping into someone else's shoes ... or, er, helmet
Stepping into the first gallery, there is no expected bombardment of modern technology, nothing so advanced as the exhibit's description implies. Instead there is something familiar: the replication of a set from Stanley Kubrick's "2001: A Space Odyssey." This piece is by Mathieu Briand, a French artist, who titled it "UBIQ, A Mental Odyssey, 2006."The scene is of the minimalist, sterile waiting room, where, at the beginning of the film, the main character is asked for identification. Instead of this "future," computerized form of questioning, four wireless helmets wait to be picked up by visitors. With the helmet on, you can wander around the white, mod-style room, looking into two tiny screens, only to notice that what is in front of you in reality, is not being projected on the screens. Rather, by pressing a button on a handheld device, you can deliberately switch the view to that which is being recorded on one of the other helmets, the vision of someone else in the room. Once Briand's work shows, the sense of space is deconstructed entirely, as you can see people you are not anywhere near, and watching your feet out of the corner of your vision, simultaneously understand where you are and be tricked into thinking you are somewhere else in the room. Adding to the strangeness, if you press the button enough, you may see that someone is in fact, staring directly at you, and watch yourself for a few seconds, stumbling about the room, helmeted, and robot-like.
On one of the walls, a false window has been constructed, showing a view of the Earth floating in space, making the brightness of the room more artificial, more blinding and uncomfortable. After a while, the retro style of the set is less prominent than the actual sense of being in the most remote of environments, space. At the Artists and Curators Panel held at the MIT List Visual Arts Center on Friday, Oct. 13, Mathieu Briand described his goal, "For me it is a question of time, of fake and reality, of technology and science. We can accept a world that is totally unacceptable for me, so I decided to go to a different place: the satellite is between Earth and the Moon, but Earth is like a finished world now, and then we have the moon. To make a line between these two can bring us outside of this in-between." In fact, the view of the Earth comes from technology similar to that of Google Earth, portraying our planet as it is recorded by satellite in real-time, so though this room is in a gallery at MIT, not a space shuttle, and is in the present, not the time of Stanley Kubrick, and not the future/past of 2001, viewers are forced to question their location, as well as the reality of their vision, as it is constantly redefined on the tiny headset screens.
The Revolution of Smell
Taking off the helmet is a kind of relief, and leaving this "Space Odyssey," viewers enter a room that initially seems forgiving to the sense of vision, but holds a great deal of meaning for something more subtle, not immediately obvious, the sense of smell. The room is nearly empty, with white walls except for the numbers one through nine printed as if the room is sectioned off. A caption invites those reading it to "rub the walls" in order to release a scent in a kind of Scratch-n-Sniff practice. This is Norwegian artist, Sissel Tolaas' revolutionary work called "The FEAR of smell-the smell of FEAR, 2006" in which she took samples and studied the sweat of different men, ranging in age and nationality, but who share a distinctly human quality, that of fear. According to Arning, when asked why she chose to use men, Tolaas remarked that firstly, they are "stickier," and secondly, they tend to keep things internalized, and are more inclined to express themselves in bodily ways. Whether this is true or not, the walls release what is distinctly the stench of body odor, and while rubbing a wall in a gallery seems unusual and tempting, the revulsion of the smell sends most people away from the walls instantly, with grimaces and, well, a little of the smell on their fingers.
Using the technology of the perfume manufacturing industry, Tolaas keeps her subjects anonymous except for labeling one through nine "Animalic sweat, Asian sweat, Buttery sweat, Coriander sweat, New York 1, 2, and 3 sweat, SM sweat," and finally, "Whiskey tobacco sweat" (this last one being the most attractive of the nine, according to Arning). Four perfume bottles labeled with the numbers wait on a wall, offering anyone daring enough to spray the condensed sweat on. Needless to say, Arning reports that no one but the artist herself has tried it.
Despite the disgust involved in Tolaas' work, she's a kind of genius, confronting us with something as intangible, yet profoundly disturbing as smell. At the Curator/Artist Panel, Tolaas discussed her work, "What does the body say by its own smell? The body is not allowed to be natural, so what is the next step? It is about learning about smell and then figuring out how to communicate smell in language. We only have the connotation of smells in terms of bad and good, so I am teaching myself to be tolerant. We have to go back to the body, back to nothing." Creating her own language, NASALO, she has declared a revolution of smell, imploring us all to be more mindful, to use words that aren't merely "good," "bad," or analogies, and it works, because returning to her gallery after seeing the other exhibits, the stench of body odor is suddenly obvious, the room packed with it, and you immediately notice the finger prints on the walls, so that the minimalism the space initially had is abruptly messy, a completely different room.
A house that bombards the senses
After this whiteness, walking into "Opera for a Small Room, 2005," Canadians Janet Cardiff and George Bures Miller's piece is pitch black, with a wooden cabin built in the center of a large room. Though there is no way to get into the cabin itself, there are cracks in the wood and a large window allowing you to peer into a tangible "mess," different than that of Tolaas' gallery. Here there is a clutter of old records, all marked "R. Dennehy," filling bookcases, scattered on the floor, on tables and chairs. Some turntables and speakers sit among the tiny "studio" and bare light bulbs, along with a vintage chandelier, and old speakers. The lights go down and surround sound booms around the outside room, the music of just before a concert, when the orchestra is tuning and people take their seats, finally applauding, and the show begins. The room outside of the cabin remains dark, save for lightning that strikes when an opera singer hits his highest note, but the cabin's light changes, synchronized with the music of a Tom Waits sounding narrator, the effect of a shadow moving around a room, the sounds of shuffling, coughing, the pulling out of a chair, and the record player starting and stopping on its own. The music is a medley of opera, "When a Man Loves a Woman," a train careening around a corner, the deafening sound of crickets, thunder and rain, a hypnotist's coaxing, all as a Heinz tomato ketchup can hanging from the ceiling glows red with light.
This twenty minute loop throws visitors' senses around the room, alternating the sensations of the interior of this stunning array of R. Dennehy's "stuff," and the vacant, dark, but crowded with noise exterior. The result is much like going to the movies, as the show is separate, in a different, distant space, but enveloping, moving, and seemingly real. The artists work revolves around what they described as "how our senses can be so fooled so easily."
Making the viewer's presence part of the art
To further the theme of disorientation, Ryoji Ikeda's "Spectra II, 2006" is a sound, light, and architecture installation in which the artist, a Japanese composer and sound artist, uses strobe lights, lasers, and high frequency sound waves in a long, narrow corridor to make viewers, who may only enter one at a time, dizzy with the oncoming, sudden light. `The concept is that the movement and presence of the person walking through the hallway disrupts the sound waves, setting off the discomforting effects.
Lastly, and perhaps the most out of place in Sensorium, is Bruce Nauman's piece, "Mapping the Studio (Fat Chance John Cage), 2001," in which he has spliced film recorded by way of infrared technology, so we can essentially see in the dark of the artist's studio after he has left for the night. The caption explains that the occasional mouse and the artist's cat are recorded, but in a 51 minute loop, the screen mostly shows an eerie, greenish scene of an unmoving desk, and though there is integrity in the concept, what is recorded is less than impressive.
Part 1 of MIT LVAC's "Sensorium" exhibition, running until December 31, is an interactive array of art combined with technology. "They are portraits of evacuated subjects" stated Jane Farver, the director of the MIT LVAC at the panel, that place viewers in situations that require more of themselves, forced to question the theme that Mathieu Briand sums up with, "For me, we are never really in reality."
