If you ever wondered what it’s like to be a synaesthete, this video might provide a vicarious experience. Daniel Franke’s “One Minute Soundsculpture” is exactly that (actually, a minute and six seconds): a video scored by Ryoji Ikeda and filled with visual shenanigans that correspond to the soundtrack. We don’t know how he did it, but it’s mesmerizing.
Daniel Franke is a Berlin-based artist, designer and filmmaker who participates in We Are Chopchop, a community of media artists making mischief in the form of video, generative animated shorts and kinetic sculpture. Explore the work here, and watch Franke’s sound sculpture above.
Books and movies have one small thing in common: they combine aural and visual stimuli to the purpose of telling a story. But what about the other senses? One’s mind gets to wandering.
Where Wild Things are concerned, the answer may lie at I Hate Perfume, Christopher Brosius’s laboratory of unconventional scents. Rather than pander to classical tastes with rose and lilac-scented vials, Brosius creates formulas designed to invoke the most intricate of memories. Three of the scents developed at the I Hate Perfume workshop happen to bear a particular relationship to Where the Wild Things Are, due to their relevant subject matter. To wit:
If Max’s voyage had an olfactory accompaniment, it would no doubt be Brosius’s Eternal Return, a perfume designed to simulate the scent of sailing toward the shore. The mixture blends the smells of ocean air, wooden ships, and “a faint hint of cypress trees growing on a cliff above the water.” Sounds about right.
Then there’s Wild Hunt (which NAILS the wild rumpus in odorific terms)––the bottled and compressed scent of an ancient forest complete with “torn leaves, crushed twigs, flowing sap, fallen branches, old leaves, green moss, fir, pine, and tiny mushrooms”. Finally, there’s Memory of Kindness–based on the perfumer’s reveries of childhood–which has to be the smell of Max returning home.
Gosh. Is there even a vocabulary for the way that smells influence our perception of things? Will we ever have the equivalent of an olfactory soundtrack to films? to books? Life comes with its own built-in version, after all. And childhood is definitely the most powerful origin of smells. For these reasons, the whole concept of I Hate Perfume is a slightly mind-boggling enterprise.
Maybe Smell-O-Vision is due for a high-concept comeback.
In case you’re not sure what a “nonfiction picto-essay” is, the back cover of Syncopated spells it out for you: “a series of first-person reportage pieces, profiles, and historical essays–in the form of comics.”
Visual narratives are nothing new, of course–refer to the cave paintings at Lascaux– but we’re living right now in a golden age of comics, and there’s never before been such a trove of talent to mine for a collection like Syncopated. As you might expect, the variety of the essays is suitable for even the most ill-attentive of readers. There’s a personal history of father figures, a piece of Annie Dillard-worthy nature writing in pictorial form, illustrated prisoner accounts of Guantanamo, the Eight Stages of Identity Development and a mini-documentary of subway buskers. Plus others.
Aside from the blooming popularity of the genre, there’s something fundamentally rewarding about a narrative in comic form. “Comics offer a synesthetic experience through words and pictures that no other medium can,” writes editor Brendan Burford in his introduction to the book. Why yes––that’s it, exactly.
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