Osni 02: The Scented Myth
Production company: Extraordinary Affairs
Client: Cartier
OSNI 02 - The Scented Myth is a touring immersive installation which converts fragrance from an intangible sensation into an audio visual experience.
Viewers are stripped of their senses as they enter into a pitch black space. The installation opens with a mythical incarnation of the Dame à la Panthère, an artwork created by artist George Barbier in 1914 for a Cartier invitation accompanied by a poem. The audience are then lead in near darkness to the main space with three sets of four metre high curtains of falling perfumed drops and a series of precisely calibrated projectors, which illuminate the liquid in space, forming an image of a moving panther.
I worked closely with head perfumer Mathilde Laurent, creative director for the project, as well as the rest of the creative team at Bureau Of Extraordinary Affairs. My brief was to create a meditative soundtrack that was felt as well as heard, drawing on healing frequencies. The music was designed to create a sense of calm that built during the course of the experience, highlighting the movement of the panther, and building to an audiovisual crescendo, heightening all the senses. The movement of the panther was picked out with a subtle layer of sound design, just enough to help give it some extra body. The sound was spatialised across a specially designed 5.2.2 multi channel sound system.
The end result is particularly hard to capture on video but hopefully the documentation goes some way to illustrate the transportive nature of the project. However without the scent and the sensory deprivation that the darkness of the space creates, the delicateness of the projections and the immersive sound, it is very hard to fully represent the experience.