Olfactory Art Keller has debuted a new installation to its permanent collection, Adnose. The multimedia artist Adnan Aga was born without a sense of smell and has never experienced what others described to him as the superpower of being transported through time and space by volatile molecules entering his nose.
Aga's installation Adnose is an experimental prosthetic device in the shape of a wall-mounted nose which uses Computer Vision and OpenAI's system, GPT-4, to predict the smell of any object presented to it. If an object is presented to one of Adnose's nostrils, the other nostril prints out the description of the object's smell.
According to a release, Adnose "serves not only as Adnan [Aga]'s nose, but as the nose of all members of the anosmic community, who constantly wonder what the things around them smell like." The artist hopes that his project will draw attention to the often-neglected sense of smell and to the challenges faced by those who can't smell.
Adnose is on view during regular opening hours in the gallery's Cubiculum Odoratus (25 Henry Street, New York, New York, 10002, United States).
