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agar olfactory is a speculative scent lab project that imagines the smellscapes of climate disaster and apocalyptic scenarios. agar offers wearable olfactory tools to invite sustained and embodied engagement with past and future ecological states of collapse. as a project, it acknowledges the layered apocalypses of our time, including, but not limited to: the sixth mass extinction event, the colonial apocalypse of 1492, and the covid-19 pandemic.
please note: our bottles are now being shipped in compostable biocellulose packaging instead of our usual mycelium packs!
year 1999: the y2k bug looms in every computational system in the world. as midnight strikes, entropy cascades every hour as time zones catch up to the disastrous inability to process the new millennium. computers overheat in confusion, fax machines whirr with incorrect calendar dates, and hot wires melt their protective encasing in heated protest. the path of technology is forever altered.
notes: hot fax machine, mouse pad, mac carcass, tattered wire
year 2077: humans have begun incorporating mycelium into their routines, diets, architectural structures, and medicinal systems in exponential ways. the increasingly abundant quantity of fungi in human bodies begins to create a communal bodily emanation uncannily similar to mushrooms. in the warm crevice of an armpit, you find a fruiting body.
notes: mushroom gills, skin
year 3030: human extinction has allowed flora to propagate wildly, bursting through concrete and rigid architectural structures. the skin of the earth has restored itself to a microbially-dense state. damp gives you a taste of this future; it’s a gentle whisper of a musty room in the middle of a forest, the breath of the earth as wet soil in soli-molecule form.
notes: dampness, wet soil, earth
year 2021: you live in an urban center, forced to quarantine at your apartment in a high rise for the foreseeable future. the only verdancy you’re interacting with is on a screen or in the form of a bland lettuce mix that gets delivered to you every tuesday. you miss the darkness of plants, their complex dampness and astringency. bitbit fulfills that for you by gathering the power of complex and bitter plants.
notes: chard, soil, mugwort, wormwood, valerian, bitter greens
year 2024: cicada broods XIII and XIX overwhelm turtle island, leaving gaping holes in every patch of soil in the continent as they jubilantly emerge. they buzz uncontrollably, reveling in their most glorious reunion yet. when the party is over, they leave heaps of carcasses strewn on sidewalks and grass, pulling everyone into their unboundaried libations.
notes: trampled grass, cicada carcass, tree bark, tree sap
year 2050: miniature electronic pollinators are buzzing around carrying bright pollen from stomata to stomata. you’ve begun to miss pests, creating trails of sugar to lure ants and hiding petals in your pockets for butterflies to find you. bicho is a tool for just that. it functions as an attractor of all kinds of bugs: wasps seeking the bum of a fig, beetles crowding around jasmine, and ants looking for the sweet sap of a leaf. wear at your own risk.
notes: crushed leaves, waspy fig, jasmine, camphorous lavender
years 1999-2077: jump temporal planes by experiencing the agar scents in one pack. every pack includes five fragrance samples:
cero (1999)
bitbit (2021)
bicho (2050)
matsutake musk (2077)
damp (3030)
please note: if you would like to swap out one of the five fragrances for brood, please make an order note.
edition of 50. produced through Doing Language: Word Work. commissioned by ICA:VCU in 2022
ind.must.y was created based on surveys of ICA staff and patrons about scents related to the building, thus rendering the ICA as an odorant text. the research responds to how systems like HVAC and sterilization contribute to erasure in the “white cube” art space. included with each ind.must.y edition is the fragrance, two fragrance blotters, and a zip-up pouch. 20 mL bottle.
notes: fennel, plywood, rubber, hydraulic oil, black tea, and damp earth.