This is a space installation that allows the audience to have an immersive experience. The audience will hear paragraphs of descriptions of different smells. These seemingly ordinary objects that frequently appear in daily life actually are all having significant smells. When you are sensitive enough, you could recall their smells even when you just hear their names.

With comfortable viewing space, hypnotic reading, slow gradual color projection, and infinitely extending mirror space, the audience can enter a state of meditation and personally restore a specific smell, not through the nose, but through the brain , through imagination.

The sense of smell is one of the essential sensory experiences for humans and most mammals. The sense of smell is strongly related to our emotions and memories. It is written in our genes. We don’t even need to learn that foods that emit rotten odors are something we avoid. Stinky smells make us feel disgusted. And we drool when we smell lemons. In fact, the brain itself is also cunning, sometimes it will fabricate information to deceive our body.

Daniel Dennett’s views on consciousness and free will gave me a lot of inspiration. Does free will really exist? Can we actively influence the brain to control our body and mind? Where is our consciousness?
In his book Consciousness Explained, he brought up the term “Cartesian theater,” which I tried to bring into the installation. I guess this what artists usually do: bring an abstract idea to reality.

Based on my great interest in language, I will use reading text as the core part to present in this project. By providing participants with a scene to experience how the brain can deceive us, I will use reading aloud to influence the participants’ sense of smell, not by showing the real things. This is also inspired by the language used in Hypnotism.

I hope to provide a space for the audience to perceive their own olfactory experience and enter a state of meditation.

这是一个让观众有沉浸式体验的空间装置。观众将听到关于不同气味的描述段落。这些在日常生活中经常出现的普通之物，其实都带有明确的气味。当你足够敏感时，即使你只是听到他们的名字，你也能回忆起他们的气味。舒适的观影空间，催眠式的阅读，缓慢渐变的色彩投影，无限延伸的镜面空间，都让观众更容易进入一种冥想状态，去还原一种特定的气味，不是通过鼻子，而是通过大脑，通过想象。

嗅觉是人类和大多数哺乳动物必不可少的感官体验之一。嗅觉与我们的情绪和记忆密切相关，它写在我们的基因里。我们甚至不需要学习就知道散发出腐烂气味的食物最好不要吃。臭味使我们感到恶心。而当我们闻到柠檬味时，我们会流口水。其实大脑本身也是很狡猾的，有时它会编造信息来欺骗我们的身体。

Daniel Dennett 关于意识和自由意志的观点给了我很多启发。自由意志真的存在吗？我们能否主动影响大脑来控制我们的身心？我们的意识到底在哪里？在他的《意识解释》一书中，他提出了“笛卡尔剧场”这个词，他模拟了以往人们是如何试图描述自我意识的：似乎大脑里里有一个小剧场，有一个或几个主角在向我们的身体发号施令。但实际上这些剧场又只是人类的想象之物。

但这个概念对我来说却异常有趣，我试图将它带入装置中。我猜这就是艺术家通常所做的：将抽象的想法带入现实。

基于我对语言的极大兴趣，我将在这个项目中以阅读文本为核心部分来呈现。我将通过为参与者提供一个场景，来体验大脑将如何欺骗我们，用大声朗读伴随环境音来影响参与者的嗅觉，而不是通过展示真实的有味道的东西。这也受到催眠术中所使用语言的启发。

我希望可以为观众提供一个空间，来觉察自己的嗅觉体验，以进入一种冥想的状态。