Reprogramming Perception - Tech+Art | Genius: Picasso

I like to challenge my audience with sensory experiences that can almost feel threatening. I use hair, spit, semen, blood. Why do you find it disgusting? Why is that normal? Why are things so sanitized? I think, as an artist, I'm really interested in all things sensory, especially as it relates to perception.

With things like virtual reality and augmented reality, it’s so interesting that you can kind of reprogram that perception. So, the empathy machines are a set of headsets that allow two people to swap vision. They're equipped with tiny cameras that they use for drones, actually, and video glasses. They’re programmed with radio frequency to swap feeds. So, you could look out through my eyes and I would look out through yours.

When you look at something, light bounces off that object and reflects into your retina, and it becomes processed as the image. But when you smell something, a molecule of that substance binds into your receptor and, in my mind, becomes a part of you. The project "Human Perfume" started very ambitiously, with the goal of growing a plant that could always create the scent profile of someone that had loved and lost.

It turns out it was a very complicated process, but along the way, I learned a lot of other techniques which allowed me to create a chemical re-emission of someone's smell. First, I take someone's shirt or garment that they've been wearing for a really long time, and then I cut strips of it that are the stinkiest. I put them in a solvent and then I distill it from very traditional ways, like with lye.

There’s something so inherently sensual about smell. I think in the current landscape that we're in, it's really important to come back to these sensual experiences. I really love reviewing the invisible — actually, everything from the microscopic scale to the telescopic scale, with microbial pieces that are self-portraits that I grow from my body.

I was really interested in forces that co-make me beyond myself. I was talking to a microbiologist and he was telling me about the microbiome for the first time, and how I was so blown away. For every ten cells in your body, nine of them are not your own. They’re invisible but basically live on every surface of your body and influence everything from your behavior to your mood. It's such an integral part of who you are.

I started to grow my own cultures just to see what they were. What do they look like from my armpit? What do they smell like? What do they look like from my belly button? What does it look like from my partner? You use agar, which is a gelatin, and put in a bunch of nutrients, and you set it into a jelly in a petri dish.

I would dip a sterile Q-tip in DI water and then plate it. Then, you incubate it, which means you keep it nice and toasty at the perfect temperature that it wants to be at. I had always thought of myself as a nature versus nurture kind of paradigm, but the fact that a totally different organism could also co-make me was really fascinating.

I think it’s especially important in the technological landscape to include artists because, you know, scientists and technologists strive so hard to make the world a better place. So much of what I strive to do is ask what is better, who is better, who is it better for? Is it better for you, for me, for a child? These are really charged questions that I think artists can fearlessly ask when they use these media.