I SMELL THE SMELL OF YOUR BODY,
I SMELL THE SMELL OF YOUR BODY IN SOCIETY,
I SMELL THE SMELL OF YOUR BODY IN CONNECTION TO ME

2019
Theoretical Research and corresponding installation and film
Credit: Researcher, Videographer
and Film editor

bingxinfeng.com @ 2019

“The other, who is apparent only as a symbolically represented body or as a controllable artifact, no longer appears in his or her irritating alienness.”
B. Becker — Cyborgs, Agents, and Transhumanists

“Driven by dreams of taming nature and so escaping its constraints, technical development has always invested in unification, light and flight, the struggle for enlightenment, a dream of escaping from the meat.”
S. Plant — On the Matrix

“The self and the other are losing their quality of being a rationalistic opposite— instead they become a subtle game of questions and answers”
D. Haraway — Die Neuerfindung der Natur

Bodies as interfaces — We evolve in a society where all that is sensible is congealed into images, perpetuating exhausted dichotomies of mind and body, subjects and objects, consciousness and materiality. However, discussing the Cartesian dualist dream, our collective believes that if dominating its sensuosity, the body partially loses its interactivity. As Caroline A. Jones proposes in her essay “The mediated sensorium” bodily sensing is what structures the way we think and interact with the world. Hereof, we consider that before thinking comes sensing and that it is quintessential to address the lack of sensuosity in today’s media landscape and its technological apparatus. Hence, the skin becomes the genesis to the screen, our tongues, the archeological premises to the keyboard and our hands, the prototypes of computer controllers.

I SMELL THE SMELL OF YOUR BODY,
I SMELL THE SMELL OF YOUR BODY IN SOCIETY,
I SMELL THE SMELL OF YOUR BODY IN CONNECTION TO ME

It's a textual analysis and tubular dispositive inviting the smeller to explore: a body with enhanced smells, a body technologically deprived of odor and, lastly, a concatenation of society's body smell. By being wired in submissive position, the installation wishes to cynically reflect our olfactory neglect within the clean dystopian dream we find ourselves in. In making the public aware of this absurd deprivation, we hope to create a breach towards new pleasurable horizons in otherness and smelly communion. Our project is a celebration of the pervasiveness which our bodies enhance as matters of promised putrefaction.

(Excerpt from project abstract co-created with Juliette Pepin and Julia Creuheras Marti)

Installation demonstration video

Project Research Page. Slide mouse to navigate or access the page HERE.

Installation displayed at the Goldsmiths MA/MFA Computational Arts Popup Exhibition 2019