Reodorant is a multi-sensory installation, created as a collaborative effort by Hisako Inoue (artist), Erik Carver (architect), Howard Huang (sound artist), Takashi Sato (perfumer) and Yuka Yokoyama (curator).

Who are we apart from a collection of memories? To lose our memories is to stop being the person we were. Yet to live is to be bathed in a constant flux of memories.

This paradox is always bubbling up through fiction and pop culture. In “Vanilla Sky,” Tom Cruise replaces his memory and lives in a dream life, eventually realizing that his memories are just an illusion. In “The Bourne Identity,” Matt Damon searches for his lost memories while at the same time struggling with flashbacks. As he recollects his memories, his identity seems to recover. Proust’s “In Search of Lost Time” famously begins when a bite of the madeleine triggers an avalanche of childhood memories.

In Reodorant, our team investigates what lies between culture, perception, and memory, in order to rewrite subjectivity through methodical sensory stimulation. The experiment we are conducting not only triggers memories through activating existing low-level associations, but also introduces new patterns of associations, in a facility specially designed to induce these reconnections.

Reodorant is a memory-reactive-device operating simultaneously in the channels of smell, sound, light and architecture. A monotone landscape creates a soothing atmosphere that sharpens environmental senses and elevates mental activity levels. Wandering through soft forests of smell and sound, one’s memories are gradually called up and put into motion.

Smell information is especially closely linked in the brain to both long-term and emotional memory. We are therefore testing a combination of odors with subtle but perceptible differences in order to maximize olfactory sensitivity and thus memory mobility. Of course, memory is always more creative than archival. Yet this creativity is often indistinguishable in our thoughts from reality, yielding a pervasive creative-reality.

Sounds also operate on this continuum, but with different effects. By multiplying specific odors with carefully selected audio triggers-both ambient and narrative-we are able to attain a higher degree of memory transitivity. Audio fragments and their network of associations fuse together in space into new memories, now combined with odor effects and linked with specific smells.

You are not you anymore. You have been Reodorized.