To purchase and find out more, visit agar’s dedicated website.
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 and hot wires melt their protective encasing in heated protest. the path of technology is forever altered.
bitbit
year 2021: you live in an urban center, forced to quarantine at your apartment in a high rise. 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 with the power of complex, bitter plants.
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.
damp
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.
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.