One of the innovative projects recently funded on Kickstarter has gained our particular attention: The OSMODRAMA Festival in Berlin could be a revolution. It promises storytelling with scents and scent sequences as stand-alones and in conjunction with music, dance, spoken word, theatre, cinema and opera.
The Osmodrama Festival is the first ever time-based scent-art gathering. It will present a series of events with science and art to the public. The base and prerequisite of this event is a perfectly installed Smeller 2.0 venue. The festival will take place in Radialsystem V Berlin, a space for innovative arts and ideas and coincides with the 10th anniversary celebrations of this acclaimed art venue in Summer 2016.
It always is with really new media: film in the old days or photography, the telephone, video … people were afraid in the beginning. They did not think that it was possible or thought it wouldn’t add anything useful to the existing media. When these fears are overcome, new forms of expression become indispensable.
The instrument Smeller 2.0, the digital scent organ was invented by Wolfgang Georgsdorf. With the prototype he developed and built with his team, we can finally play and perform smells in sequences of every length: time-based, controlled, without blurring or lingering. Smeller 2.0 has been successfully tried and tested in a large exhibition for three months in Austria. It is overdue to share the extensive cultural potentials of this innovation in arts and media.
Smeller 2.0 is a mighty machine, operated to blend and play thousands of smells from 64 channels with electronic precision. The smells of Smeller are real. They point to places and times of the world as if we paint invisible and silent theatre, drama and big pictures into our imagination and into the space. In that sense Smeller is truly a time and space shuttle.
The OSMODRAMA Festival’s development can be tracked at http://kck.st/1OQ5dWK