SMELL TALK DANCE
Public Symposium
With SMELL TALK DANCE, we invited artists, scientists, and curious guests to come together – to smell, talk, and dance.
The evening marked the finale of our fifth scenographic study CONCEPTION OF SŸS, and the opening of the sixth: SŸS DANCE.
To start, all six SŸS-scents could be experienced one last time. Over 2,300 votings from participants across Vienna, Porto, Bangkok, Boston, and Songkhla came together and voted on the question: What would a being smell like that knows and feels everything about connectedness and interactions? Now, the most chosen scent was ready to be revealed.
The core team – Jeanette Müller, Paul Divjak, Alexandra Graupner, and Anna-Maria Irgang – together with the systems scientists Stefan Blachfellner and Felix Tretter opened the floor for an experimental panel talk. Instead of a classic podium, we created a shared scenery and space of interest and confidence: no stage, no hierarchy. Inquisitive and critical questions were noted down by the participants, placed in a container, from which they were then drawn and answered by the discussion partners. The format invited everyone to participate – and to explore together what systems awareness means and can achieve, both within and beyond our project.
Afterwards, we opened SŸS DANCE, the sixth part of our Series of Scenographic Studies.
With SΫS DANCE the chosen scent from the previous votings filled the Art Cabin and drew a sensory shape of SΫS. Accompanied by custom-created House and Electroclash tracks based on findings and poetic fragments from our research, the space invited visitors to dance, to breathe, and connect with SΫS and what it stands for: embodied systems awareness – deep sense-ability and knowledge about interconnectedness, interactions, interdependencies, – and the beauty and joy of life itself.
The symposium is dancing!
June 2025 – AIL – Angewandte Interdisciplinary Lab, Vienna
SΫS has become a nickname for persons who develop an embodied consciousness of interdependencies, precious equilibria and fragile beauty of all life. In other words: SΫS characters evolve an embodied systems awareness. It is also an acronym and stands for Sense Your Senses – also to understand the systems that are relevant to one's own life – to Sense Your Systems.
SΫS SPACE is the SENSING LIVING SYSTEMS' multisensory scenography. The SΫS SPACE facilitates a physical experience of one's own embeddedness within living systems, within complex interrelationships – within a greater whole. It paves the way for relational sensing and thinking – the development of an embodied systems awareness, that can help in coping with complexity, challenges, and uncertainties, and in making good decisions towards sustainable futures. SΫS SPACE deliberately reduces the dominance of the sense of sight, placing the emphasis instead on smell, touch, and hearing.
SΫS SPACE is the SENSING LIVING SYSTEMS' multisensory scenography. The SΫS SPACE facilitates a physical experience of one's own embeddedness within living systems, within complex interrelationships – within a greater whole. It paves the way for relational sensing and thinking – the development of an embodied systems awareness, that can help in coping with complexity, challenges, and uncertainties, and in making good decisions towards sustainable futures. SΫS SPACE deliberately reduces the dominance of the sense of sight, placing the emphasis instead on smell, touch, and hearing.