right.gif (928 bytes)

Authors:

 Marketou, Jenny.

Title:

 Smell.Bytes TM: Art, science & hip culture

Keywords:

 website, odours, interventional environment, virtual body

Abstract:

 SMELL.BYTES T.M. operates as an environment, which invites the audience for parallel experiences. It
consists a) A website- a live intervention on the internet through CU See Me protocol b) Computer Mediated live video streams projected on the walls and sounds streamed live from the internet.
SMELL.BYTES T.M. was realized as a co-production with the Media and Visual Department at The Banff Center for the Arts, Banff, Canada, 1998. It was presented for the first time during the 24th Sao Paulo
Biennale, Brazil, 1998. SMELL.BYTES T.M. has been informed by a recent research project on "Human Beauty, Symmetry and their correlation to Body Odors" carried at the Ludwig Bolzmann Institute of urban
ethology and Human Biology,Vienna, Austria.

Utilizing the lucid esthetics of the video projections and the internet, I would like to present and discuss my recent art project SMELL.BYTES T.M.1998.The presentation will require participation and interaction with my audience. SMELL.BYTES T.M. is taking as a starting point the cultural and scientific and communicative importance in our perception of our most primal sense of smell since smell and especially body odors produce distinctions and borders of social, geographical and anthropological nature and power.
In an eclectic and ironic manner I juxtapose the visual esthetics and protocol of the public space of the wide world web,the international virtual communities and the CU See Me users, digital methods of processing
video images, live sounds streamed from the internet,the scientific data from 7.000 smells,and biological research on facial analysis and it correlation to symmetry and beauty and body odors,in order to create Chris.com a highly specific software,an intelligent agent, a bot who sniffs and lurks on the internet. Chris.com the protagonist of SMELL.BYTES T.M. whose passion is to posses the body odors of those who hang out at the teleconference spaces and cyber cafes on the internet. Chris.com has a website,with an odor lab,a stinky gallery,e-mail and a fan's club.Chris.com lurks live 24 hours,seven days a week on the web site and by sniffing and grabbing the facial profiles of the unsuspected CU See Me users,and analyzes them in its odor lab while infiltrates the chemical traits of odor of each
individual and transforms them into visual information and data of numbers and smells and finally saves them
in the stinky menu for viewing. On the other hand I assume the role of my agent,and I re-appropriate Chris.com persona in this quest of odors. Simultenuously with chris.com I capture by video streams profiles of the CU See Me subjects which i offer to the visitors as an olfactory feast of mesmeric portraits project on the walls of the gallery,choreographed to a sound track of hovering streaming sounds and speech from six different net radio stations around the world.

SMELL.BYTES T.M. Is a place of parallel structures, which develops a need for the audience in understanding the fusion of art,science and technology as tools for artistic expression,with an obligation for reflection,and help to decode the potential utility of art in relation to another way of looking at the world beyond visual representation and personal spirituality. Interacting with the bot /Chris.com on the website the audience expropriates the intimacy of a scientific crime while at the same time becomes witness to its aggressive reality.In the sequence of events which characterizes the passionate and aggressive quest of body odors the human profile becomes a trophy. The further we penetrate into chris .com virtual olfactory world void of any trace of actual smell the more aware we become of the aspects of virtual manipulation of the self as increasingly we are judged by our traces,whether this is a data from consumption patterns or genetically determined traits.
Jenny Marquetou, jmarketo@thing.net, Cooper Union School of Art, New York City. Born in Athens, Greece, she lives in New York, multimedia artist and professor. Completed a Master in Fine Arts at Pratt Institute in 1987. Her work has been seen in interational individual and group exhibitions. Recently she represented Greece in the Bienal de São Paulo and presented her work at ISEA98 in Liverpool. 1998 - She was awarded with the Resident Artist Fellowship in Creative Research in Arts and Technology from ISA, State University, Tempe, AZ and Artist in Residency at the Banff Centre for Arts in Canada.