Experiment 19
MEMORY | WITNESS OF THE UNIMAGINABLE
DÁNIEL PÉTER BIRÓ & CHRISTOPHE LAUNDAMIEL
April 17, 2015 - August 16, 2015
Memory is a stunning sensory art experience created by music composer Dániel Péter Biró and master perfumer Christophe Laudamiel, working with Le Laboratoire founder David Edwards and Rachel Field, creators of the new o-Platform, and designers Baptiste Viala, Laurent Milon, and Charlie Zehnlé (studio Millimètre), involving multiple "rituals" of scent and sound. Memory invites the public to engage in a kind of "memory sport," with ramifications to contemporary therapeutic approaches to address memory loss and Alzheimer's disease. The installation explores the possibilities of awakening memory through non-representational art forms that alternate between conscious and unconscious perception. Participants move before scent messaging objects (oPhones) and sound installations that act as windows to processes of historical, personal, and social memory, and introduce realms of concrete material realities and virtual, historical myths.
Accompanying the opening of Memory: Witness of the Unimaginable will be the launch of the o-Platform, with the new oMedia, permitting book, music, film and other narrative experience to be accompanied by rich scent compositions. These scent compositions in the exhibition all created originally by Christophe Laudamiel, are designed to provoke memories and emotional reactions. The scent of Silence is a particularly important scent of the exhibition and will be available to exhibition goers in the form of a scent bracelet, or oBracelet, containing the oNote ofSilence. The Memory exhibition, as well as the o-Platform, is an artistic and technological respons to the growing fascination of science around the importance of scent to human health and the mind, including circumstances of stress/relaxation, hunger/satiation, fear/tranquility, and memory loss.
About Dániel Péter Biró
Dániel Péter Biró is Associate Professor of Composition and Music Theory at the School of Music at the University of Victoria. He began his studies at the Bartók Conservatory in Budapest, Hungary studying composition. He completed his PhD in composition at Princeton University in 2004. Dr. Biró has researched Hungarian folk music at the Academy of Science in Budapest and Jewish and Islamic chant in Israel and the Netherlands. Awarded the Hungarian Government's Kodály Award for Hungarian composers, his compositions have been commissioned by the Frankfurt Radio Symphony, the City of Darmstadt, the Stuttgart Opera, Sudwestfunk, Vancouver New Music, the ISCM, and the Imatronic Festival. Biró was awarded a fellowship from the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University for 2014-2015. During the time at the institute he will work on the completion of the composition cycle Mishpatim (Laws). Biró is co-editor (with Harald Krebs) of The String Quartets of Béla Bartók: Tradition and Legacy in Analytical Perspective (Oxford University Press). He is a founding member of the new music ensemble Tsilumos, co-organizer of the Salt New Music Festival and Symposium and is co-editor of Search - Journal for New Music and Culture.
About Christophe Laudamiel
Christophe Laudamiel is a perfumer, scent composer, lecturer, performer, writer, Osmocurator (TM) and trained chemist who has created fragrances for Houses such as Estee Lauder, Ralph Lauren, Burberry, Tom Ford, Clinique, Michael Kors, Humiecki & Graef, Nest, and Abercrombie & Fitch. He is Master Perfumer at DreamAir LLC, a unique enterprise in bespoke fragrances. With colleague Christoph Hornetz, he has designed Air Sculpture ® scents for such places as the Langham Place Fifth Avenue Hotel, Giorgio Armani and Emporio Armani (select locations worldwide). Laudamiel authored and managed 30+ scents for the first Scent Opera (Guggenheim Museums, New York and Bilbao, 2009). He is the first and only perfumer to have scents formally archived and has founded the not-for-profit Academy of Perfumery in the USA. Christophe is known for his pioneering work across fragrant applications, leaving behind a trail of patents, new technologies and, of course, unforgettable signature scents.