Het Parfum: speel de toekomst van de stad.
With Mediamatic
De Uitmarkt
Weekend of August 24, 25 + 26, 2018
Marine Terrein, Amsterdam
The Uitmarkt Project (also known as Het Parfum: speel de toekomst van de stad.) is an art project that takes the form of a game, designed to foster public discussion about the future of the Amsterdam’s Navy Terrain in the Oosterdok area. The project is intended to trigger and inform public debate through a sense that is internal and endemic to our experience of the city: Olfaction.
ABOUT
Mediamatic, The Institute for Art and Olfaction, and Play the City are teaming up to propose an urban development game using custom-made fragrances articulating possible urban futures, to be played at the end of August, 2018.
This massive multi-user game explores the future of a new and highly contested part of Amsterdam city center, the Marine Etablissement. This historic navy territory is now opening up for public use, providing the city of Amsterdam with an opportunity to make crucial public-facing decisions about how it gets to use the overlapping (public/navy) space. The city has planned to make a decision about the future of the shared space in 2018.
This pending decision provides Mediamatic with an opportunity to encourage civic consciousness about the effects the space could have on their urban experience. Our proposal rests upon the fact that the public should be engaged in the final decisions and choices.
The game thus has the purpose of raising awareness by encouraging Amsterdam’s citizens and guests to become interested and involved in these discussions. We do this by encouraging artists to become involved in articulating the choices through the lens of scent, a sense that is strongly connected to spatial experience (and experience of the city).
Although the consequences of urban planning decisions have sensorial impact, public issues are often explored without bearing these effects and experiences in mind. In inviting scent artists to express these choices as art pieces, the game will serve the purpose of helping people become more aware of their options, simply by allowing them to experience them through a different sense.
With this game, we hope to explore this choice we are all facing, and reduce this complex issue space to a small number of clearly articulated and wholly experimental choices.
SCENTS
Using discussions with city officials as a springboard, the game explores several of the realistic options that will be publicly debated after the summer:
+ Navy, by Alessandro Gualtieri
+ Outdoor Sports + Leisure, by Spyros Drosopoulos
+ Gentrification, by Niklaus Mettler
+ Social Enterprise with Refugees, by Maki Ueda
+ Party Zone + Festival, by Ricardo Moya, with IFF
These five options will be explored in fragrance designed by perfumer-artists with deep connections to Amsterdam. These scents will be released in three ways:
Collectible Edition: As a limited set of artist-made bottles, to be presented to Amsterdam’s mayor, and to be placed in important cultural institutions.
Reward Edition: As a large-volume game reward for participants in the game, during Uitmarkt
Open Source: As an open-source formula, for public distribution, with attribution
OPEN SOURCING
As part of the Institute for Art and Olfaction and Mediamatic’s ongoing Open Sourcing Smell Culture Project – and in deference to the public-affecting (and therefore necessarily transparent) nature of the future impact the urban decision will have on the city’s citizens – all scents created for the project will be open sourced through a sharing and attribution licensing system.
GAME
The art project takes the form of a multi-player game during the Uitmarkt event in August, 2018. The game is designed to encourage people to socialize, become friends, debate the best use of public space, and engage in the civic identity of their city. It provides a little model for the larger city discussion, playfully framing the important question of how the city will develop.
Participants in the game receive:
A token: A small, but highly visible object that will serve as one of many tokens, the sum total of which create potential scent formulas. One component can be in various future-representing perfumes.
A menu: A list of the component parts required to articulate the scent of each possible future.
A task: Participants are tasked with finding other people with the components they need, to make the fragrance they want. This will require locating tokens, debating their owners, persuading them to share their token, and come to agreement.
Tokens: As a metaphor for the ways of power and influence, and to create perceptions of value, each token will cost the participant a minimal amount of money. Each additional token increases in cost expontentially. Participants are thus able to either purchase the tokens they want, or they can trade and negotiate.
Game play: Participants come to several stations where they are handed a token, a menu and a task. Participants are encouraged to look for other participants across Uitmarkt, form groups and collect the tokens they need. Once groups collect the required tokens for their desired future, they can turn them in at Mediamatic’s barn. The scent formula will be mixed on site, and handed out to each token-bearer.
COLLABORATORS
ABOUT UITMARKT
The Uitmarkt is the opening of the cultural season in Amsterdam, held every year over a weekend at the end of August. It is a fair and festival. Many theatres open their doors for free to shows that range from classical music and ballet to hiphop, cabaret, literary recitals and film. Attendance typically comes to ¼ million people. The events are broadcast on primetime television, with high-impact media coverage. It will take place on and around the Marine Terrein area at Oosterdok.
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ABOUT MEDIAMATIC
Mediamatic is a cultural institution dedicated to new developments in the arts since 1983. We organize lectures, workshops and art projects, focusing on nature, biotechnology and art+science in a strong international network.
At Mediamatic we are always looking for new developments in society. We are interested in how art, design and science merge and how we can use this to experiment with new (living) materials. We challenge the senses and tackle perceptions regarding food, waste and unconventional materials such as piss, bacteria and fungi. The processes involved are all based on sustainable principles, as we are happy to contribute to a circular economy.
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ABOUT THE INSTITUTE FOR ART AND OLFACTION
Founded in September 2012 in Los Angeles, The Institute for Art and Olfaction is a 501(c)3 non-profit devoted to advancing public, artistic and experimental engagement with scent. We do this by initiating and supporting experimental projects that utilize the medium of scent, by providing accessible and affordable education in our laboratory as well as in partnership with institutions and community groups, and by celebrating excellence in independent, artisan and experimental perfumery through our yearly award mechanism, The Art and Olfaction Awards. Through these efforts, we extend the world of scent beyond its traditional boundaries of appreciation and use.
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ABOUT PLAY THE CITY
Play the City is a global practice that supports public and private parties on large scale development projects through city gaming. The method stems from the doctoral work of Ekim Tan conducted at the Delft University of Technology.
Play the City is a multidisciplinary team of technologists, designers and social scientists with an international outlook. The team embraces an approach at the intersection of practice and research, allowing them to undertake a large range of projects from theoretical research to pragmatic applications. Possible programme options for Marineterrein Amsterdam: Please realise that the terrain is already Navy since 360 years. The military are opening up the terrain but will not leave. To the chagrin of some in our city. So navy will remain something to reckon with. How to articulated that in the fragrances is up to the artists.
Mediamatic and the Institute for Art and Olfaction (IAO) team up for a summer program in Amsterdam, exploring innovative topics around olfaction.
Both Mediamatic and IAO have an organizational focus on exploring future outcomes and contemporary applications in science, art, and the senses. Between July 16 and August 15, 2018, the IAO’s Los Angeles team will be in residence at Mediamatic in Amsterdam in the first part of an ongoing collaboration between the two organizations.
Through thematic collaborative programming at Mediamatic’s Oosterdok waterfront location, we will combine our interests and communities to investigate new models for intellectual property, and to celebrate storytelling, future flavors, scent-making, and much more.
Art Olfaction Amsterdam is possible through the generous support of IFF, Pochpac, and dublab.
