Smeller (since 2012: Smeller 2.0) is an installation by the Berlin-based artist Wolfgang Georgsdorf, which as an instrument and medium enables the composing and precise broadcasting or performance of complex scent sequences. These can also be synchronized with simultaneously reproduced sounds, films, narrative texts, dance or theatre.
The first mechanically controllable prototype of a scent ‘organ’ (in the sense of a musical instrument) was invented by Wolfgang Georgsdorf in 1990 and demonstrated for the first time in the Oberösterreichisches Landesmuseum.[1][2][3] Georgsdorf thus realized a time-based art form he called Osmodrama in order to enable the exploration and performance of olfactory sequences and ‘chords’.[4] The instrument is used for staging, programming, recording and playback. Smeller 2.0, which can be played or controlled by MIDI, was first presented to the public in 2012 in the exhibition Sinnesrausch at the OK Center for Contemporary Art in the OÖ Kulturquartier in Linz, Austria.[5] Georgsdorf cooperated with the perfumer Geza Schön for the development of the individual odour components. In the same place one year later, the native scent film "NO(I)SE 1" premiered during the film festival Crossing Europe.[6]
In the same year Georgsdorf received the Austrian award "Outstanding Artist Award for Interdisciplinarity" for the project Smeller 2.0.[7]
In 2016, Georgsdorf presented Smeller 2.0 in the nine-week event Osmodrama Berlin 2016 - Festival für Geruchskunst.[8][9][10] In 2017 Wolfgang Georgsdorf received the Art and Olfaction Award for Osmodrama in the category 'Experimental Work with Scent'.[11]
The Smeller is a kind of musical 'organ' consisting of tubes and chambers. It is equipped with polypropylene pipes and aluminum hoses which deliver precisely dosed scents to a continuously existing air flow; overlays of different fragrances are thus avoided.[12] The Smeller is operated in his current presentation form Smeller 2.0 via computer and/or MIDI keyboard.
During the emerging practice of Osmodrama, Wolfgang Georgsdorf and his collaborators were obliged to invent terms to describe unprecedented techno-olfactory phenomena: