Dressing The Air is the brainchild of the London-based artist Paul Schütze.

In a career spanning 30 years, Schütze has exhibited his photographic and installation works in galleries and museums around the world, released over thirty albums of original recordings, scored a number of films and performed numerous concerts. He has collaborated with artists such as James Turrell, Josiah McElheny and Isaac Julien and musicians as diverse as Bill Laswell, Raoul Björkenheim, Toshinori Kondo, Lol Coxhill and Jah Wobble.

Dressing The Air is a unique open resource that aims to enrich creative thinking by encouraging a multi-sensory approach. A constantly evolving archive and creative news feed, Dressing The Air monitors and reports on a diverse range of art-forms from cinema to sculpture, painting to furniture design, land-art to perfumery.

dressing the air: the bureau of sensory intelligence

a creative resource to provoke and inspire

The Domestichordphone - Piet Zwart Institute
Eglė Jacinavičiūtė & Savvas Laz

The Domestichordphone - Piet Zwart Institute

As part of Instruments: Reimagining The Music Room at the Piet Zwart Institute EglÄ— JacinavičiÅ«tÄ— and Savvas Laz have devised this wonderful hybrid object. Taking the most prosaic of domestic objects, subject to equally prosaic physical interaction, the makers have injected an entirely unexpected and some might say unnecessary sonic behavior. That the passage of each drawer results in the plucking of strings transforms both the sonic environment and the bodily action of use. The mundane can become ritualized, contemplative, even annoying. What makes this so edifying is the transformation: the moment at which one activity becomes another. Anything which breaks habit and convention also breaks into the circularity of thought freeing us to reimagine pretty well everything.

Vimeo
"The absence of a true olfactory vocabulary in European languages has long preoccupied Western scientists. Although the human nose is capable of recognising thousands of different odours, nearly all of our odour categories - sweet, pungent, bitter and so on - are borrowed from a limited selection of taste terms."
- Classen, Howes & Synnott, 1994, Aroma: The Cultural History Of Smell