The Big Anxiety Sydney: festival of arts + science + people

Raewyn Turner and Brian Harris - 20 Sept - 11 Nov 2017

Raewyn Turner & Brian Harris were commissioned to create two installations for Snoosphere in The Big Anxiety Festival : a fragrant vapour work and three touch and olfactory works. Snoosphere : a sensory environment employing autistic artists’ insight into hyper-sensitivity. Snoösphere is a responsive sensory environment to roam, touch and explore. Designed by Elena Knox (artist) and Lindsay Webb (architect), Lull Studios and Dr Dawn Joy Leong (autistic artist and activist) . More about Snoosphere here

The Big Anxiety Festival 2017 . ill Bennett is Director of The Big Anxiety and Professor and Director of the National Institute for Experimental Arts at UNSW Sydney. She has co-created many arts projects, exploring areas such as trauma, memory loss and subjective experience. Her books include Empathic Vision: Affect, Trauma and Contemporary Art (2005) and Practical Aesthetics: Events, Affects and Art After 9/11 (2012).

Read about the Big Anxiety Festival here in Artlink This edition has been commissioned in association with The Big Anxiety Festival in Sydney to explore themes of anxiety, fear, stress and mental health from a range of cultural and neuro-diverse perspectives. Commissioned essays, artist and project profiles forefront current practices and trends in the visual arts and related disciplines as a therapeutic, creative and intellectual response to living in a state of anxiety.

Lateline Snoosphere: the art installation tackling mental illness Posted Wed 20 Sep 2017, 10:08pm

 The Coversation: Autism and the arts: making a space for different minds

OOC ( Olfactory Operant conditioning ) Raewyn Turner & Brian Harris 2017

Interactive electronic sculpture : Synthetic fur, fragrance, wood and mechatronics

OOC expresses an odour cue when a human approaches, signalling the invitation to smooth down the ruffled fur, to practise consolation. If several stroking conditions are met, OOC’s logical brain intensifies the vibrations, then the object rests, then rubs its surface up the wrong way to invite more consolatory stroking.

Ancient consolation literature addressed causes for consolation including death, exile, poverty, political failure, illness, shipwreck and old age. Writers of consolation letters drew on all forms of oral and written communication dealing with hardship or death, and flexibility was of paramount importance, as the goal was to comfort rather than to argue for a specific view.

‘OOC’ was inspired by Raewyn observing the training of rats and mice bred and trained for laboratory experiments. Olfactory Operant Conditioning tasks are standard practice in training laboratory animals.

In Schedules of Reinforcement B.F. Skinner psychologist, behaviourist and social philosopher and Charles Ferster, American Behavioural Psychologist wrote on the experimental analysis of behaviour and Operant Conditioning. Schedules of Reinforcement represents over 70,000 hours of research primarily with pigeons, though the principles have now been experimentally verified with many species including human beings.

Fragrant Vapour installation Raewyn Turner & Brian Harris 2017

Interactive electronic sculpture.

When a person approaches liquid is dropped from the pipe and is vapourised into fragrant steam : frankincense, galbanum, rose de mai, tuberose, pink grapefruit, rosemary, blue cypress, sweet orange, blood orange, cinnamon bark

Sauna rocks, fragrance, peristaltic pumps triggered to pump in a sequence using microprocessors, proximity sensors, water, wood barrier fence.