source: peterdecupereet

Explore the smells of your city, environment or another location by simply walking by and sniffing with the Blind Smell Stick.

The little bulb on top of the stick has holes in it and it detects the smells. With the use of a few mini ventilators, heating, and filters, the scents reach your nose through a special tube. You can wear dark sunglasses and really focus on the smells or you can also open the dark glasses and take a look at what you’re smelling.

It’s another way to explore a city or the surroundings.

The Blind Smell Stick lets you re-design the way you experience your life.
It’s also a tool to help blind people to find their way and to help them enjoy their daily life more.

It has a lot of possibilities. We could make a smell line (Smell Groove) through the city and every street would have their own smell. That makes it easier on people to find their way and also makes it more pleasurable.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
source: peterdecupereet

By exploiting the subjective, associative impact of smells, in combination with visual images, Peter De Cupere generates a kind of meta-sensory experience that goes beyond purely seeing or smelling. Plastic artist De Cupere paints with scents, produces olfactory objects, soap paintings and sculptures, creates video and live performances, makes three-dimensional drawings and builds poetic smell installations.

Everyone who has ever smelt Peter De Cupere‘s work cannot fail to recognise that his works prompt quite a reaction. You either love it or you feel attacked via your nasal senses. If the latter is true it is often because the spectator adopts a reserved attitude at first as a result of being wary of the unknown. That is exactly why smells in art have been and are still positively avoided. People like to compare and want a return or recognition. This is difficult with smells because they act directly on the limbic system and don‘t give you the necessary time and chance to translate things like you do with „sight“. Smells act on your memory subconsciously and so you associate your own subjective feelings with a specific smell. Your attitude to the object is determined by the smell memory of a certain moment. Add then the combination with the visual aspect of the artwork and you get a mix that does not appear to be completely predictable. Alongside the pleasance of some smells there are also smells that warn us of danger though we do not always need these indications because of habituation. If you cross the street there are many damaging smells

present because of pollution: exhaust fumes, rotting processes from discarded foodstuffs, toxic fumes from asphalt and other building materials that are freed by heat from the sun, polluted rain, sewers, etc. But the normal city person has become used to all the exhaust fumes and other air-polluting substances.