Abstract

Keywords: Information, visualisation, data, electricity, olfactory, perception, infrastructure, smell.

Information visualisations within the field of environmental art are often imbued with an agenda for catalysing changes in behavior. They are political images that rhetorically ask how we might act differently in our relationship to what is being measured. This paper explores the complexity of information visualisations by discussing the radically different informatic strategies deployed in the installation artwork, What the Frog’s Nose tells the Frog’s Brain. Exhibited at ISEA2013, the work uses smell as a medium for producing information. The politics of smell remain relatively open, making it a rhetorical device rich with possibilities for exploring alternative modes of information production.

• Tega Brain, College of Fine Arts, University of New South Wales, Sydney, AU

Full text (PDF) p. 448-451