Digital Culture & AudioVisual Challenges

The use of multisensory stimuli in museum exhibitions has been increasingly observed over the last few decades, signaling the yearning for an alternative mode of perception and a proposal for an experiential and immersive engagement with art. This paper will focus on the ways in which the senses of taste and smell have been used to achieve more effective immersion of the audience within the exhibition narrative. More specifically, the first part will explore five exhibitions as case studies showcasing a variety of technologies used, whether they are high-tech, low-tech or more analogue approaches. The five exhibitions analysed as case studies were selected based on their systematic use of multisensory applications based on the following axes: first, the use and configuration of space; second, the existence or absence of a clear theoretical framework; third, the deployment or non-deployment of technological means in their multisensory approaches; and fourth, the reception of these applications.

The second part of the paper will be dedicated to showcasing the methodology developed by the author to integrate the sense of taste as an interpretative tool for artworks in the context of museum exhibitions. This experimental process was part of her doctoral research and was based on the ideas of the psychology of visual perception in art. Drawing inspiration from the case studies mentioned above and after carefully studying and analysing their benefits and flaws, the author decided to design and implement an experimental multisensory experience for the exhibition “Solomon Nikritin (1898-1965). Heeding Life” at the MOMus Museum of Modern Art - Costakis Collection. The sense in focus for this experiment was taste, as it is up to this day the most unappreciated and under-utilised sense in the context of museum exhibitions. The experiment had two objectives: firstly, to act as a test in the design and implementation of gustatory stimuli that might function as interpretative tools, that is, tools with the potential to help visitors perceive and better understand an artwork. Secondly, to observe and record the degree of success of this objective, meaning, to what extent the public, upon tasting each stimulus, made some perceptual connection between the visual and gustatory stimuli.

Three paintings presented at the exhibition were used in the context of the experiment: one by Solomon Nikritin and two by Kliment Redko. Apart from highlighting which aspects of each painting acted as inspiration during the design process and why, a detailed description of each gustatory stimuli is included. More specifically, how a variety of ingredients were utilised to showcase each selected facet of the paintings and how they contributed to the multisensory experience as a whole.