TASTE - ETSAT

It's fairly common knowledge, amongst the drinks and food community, that you can affect taste perception using odour and scent. However the practical application of this knowledge behind a bar is still being explored. Take for instance a Vodka martini, combine it with different scents throughout the drink and you suddenly have several different flavoured martini's within one glass.

Sissel Tolaas created something similar, the median however was a bowl of rice and the scents not so much fruits or flavours as actions and emotions. The idea was to test your chemical senses and see how accurate they were. Tastes includes, Fear, Talk, Walk, Start, Future and Curiosity.

While this installation featured more around art and experience it does create a fairly simple template for interpretation by others.

More information from V2_ on the installation below. The main question of the installation is "which of these scents does your senses tell you to trust?"



"Chemical senses are gatekeepers of the body; they provide us with information about substances in the outside world and thus influence our decisions on what to eat, drink and think. What our chemical senses tell us about the outside world is however not hard-wired in the brain, but can be changed by experience. Experiences that in today’s world are the product of a food industry that does not necessarily prioritize our health. Can we still rely on our chemical senses to tell us which substances to consume?"

"The installation TASTE - ETSAT by Sissel Tolaas, trials your chemical senses on a journey passing six different tastes: Fear, Talk, Walk, Start, Future, and Curiosity. The visitors experience these tastes by eating plane rice while being exposed to six different odors. These odors were specially designed by Tolaas for V2_ for a presentation during the 2012 edition of the Rotterdam Museumnight and Test_Lab: Smell This! "