Measuring the body.


My next experiment for this project was based around the idea of measuring the body in relation to smell. The idea has stemmed from the fact that we all have an individual scent, the fact that our smell can lead animals like dogs to find us, the new baby smell or the fact that 17th century Japanese people encountering Europeans for the first time found their body odour very strong, liking it to rancid butter.

I'm not sure how smell is measured in the conventional sense, but this is how I did it.   I covered my body binding it with scrim bandages and then with cling film.   I then slept in it overnight. The following morning I put the bandages in sterile jars.   The idea is that the bandages will hold some of my smell and stay trapped in the sealed jars.  Daft or what, but I did really do this experiment and here's the proof.

This is how I displayed the finished experiment, it would be great to have real specimen jars to give this sculptural experiment a more science feel.

So far excluding myself, there has only been one person brave enough to risk the smell.