Metronome art installation at London Biennale is inspired by ASMR principles
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Pingreoun was born in Bourges, a central French town entwined with the history of alchemy, and grew up in Lyon, a city renowned for its cuisine. Formerly the global design curator of the A/D/O/ creative space in Brooklyn, New York, today she helms London-based Alter Projects, a multidisciplinary curatorial practice with clients including Calvin Klein, Cartier and the Manhattan Loft Corporation.
Servaire, founder and creative director of Parisian agency Servaire & Co, designs product, architecture and brand strategy for luxury clients such as Veuve Clicquot (for whom he devised a rather funky handbag/wine cooler), pâtissier Fauchon and legendary Left Bank parfumerie Diptych.
For Metronome, Servaire designed a new olfactory system that incorporates scented wooden beads into a nozzle head at one end of a pendulum – the other is counterweighted, like a grandfather clock – that describes a 60-degree arc within the static, brass-plated Möbius strip.
“The scent is activated by the motion of the pendulum through air,” Pingreoun explains. “The goal is not to scent the room, but to create an intimate space that can be interpreted differently by each user.”
Sonic Bloom, curated by Alter-Projects, is a playground of sound rebuilding a sense of community in London after a year of isolation.
As for the autonomous sensory meridian response soundtrack, that was produced by Sydney-based designer Steve Lastro who has a particular interest in wellness technology. Despite its scientific sounding acronym, ASMR is a term coined in 2009 by a woman who had experienced what she thought of as a “brain orgasm” – a warm effervescence, making its way down the length of her spine – while watching videos of … space.
Today YouTube is awash with videos of (mostly young, usually well-groomed) people whispering soporifically while turning pages of books, pretending to groom you or peeling dried glue off artificial ears.
There is even an online ASMR university where one can learn the approximate science behind such skills – and I confess to have aural recordings on my phone to help me sleep. (Being whispered to by a fake air steward mid-flight seems particularly effective.)
“ASMR has created a huge buzz on the internet but no one was really using it in a design sense,” says Pingreoun, who imagines the Metronome being scaled down and adapted for home use. “We all need a quiet space in which to recentre ourselves.”
As the final volume of Proust’s opus was titled: Time Regained.
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