Love & Olfaction
Our nose arguably couples us most directly to our environment. It is a part of the brain that is quite literally hanging outside of our body to pick up information about the world around us, and isn't filtered as much as other senses before it reaches our consciousness.
Not surprisingly then, it also plays an important role in our love life. Supposedly, our nose can subconsciously help us select a lover whose immune system nicely complements ours and who will give us strong, healthy babies. However, in many setting where we look for love, we mask our scent behind visual profiles or carefully designed commercial scents, potentially losing all the evolutionary power of smell selection.
The big Museumnacht Love Sweat Love experiment
On Museumnacht (November 5), we give you the opportunity to re-stimulate this sensational sense in the installation Love Sweat Love. This is how it works:
- On arrival, you get a special Mediamatic smell collection kit, which extracts your personal smell.
- While it is extracting, you can subject every other sample to careful olfactory examination and sniff your way through the smell arena.
- On submission of your own sample, you can select and rate your favourite smells and show the donors your anonymous appreciation.
- If there is a match, i.e. two donors like each other's smell, we get them in contact.
Join us in the olfactory dating pool!
Tickets for Museumnacht can be bought via this link. Go here to see the rest of our Museumnacht program.
Sneak Peak
Don't have time to come to the Museumnacht? Or are you interested in other olfactory artworks and stories? Join Lauryn Mannigel, Jasper de Groot, Maret Mihklepp and Caro Verbeek on Thursday November 3rd during: Odorama: The body Odour Edition. Where we will discuss our body odour prejudices, multi-sensory perception, chemical communication and bacterial perfumes. Tickets to Odorama are available via this link.
Information
Love Sweat Love at Museumnacht November 5th 20:00-23:00
(samples available to smell until November 7th)
Free entrance with a Museumnacht bracelet
Sluisdeurenloods
Mediamatic Biotoop
Dijksgracht 6
1019 BS Amsterdam
