Internettraces: Experimental Data Work

Raewyn Turner and Mary Griffith 2010

Internettraces is a wine tasting performance. If the internet experience was a wine tasting how would its various aspects taste/smell ?  The audience are invited to taste the digital through the language of the eight poems. Each ‘digital’ poem has its own website, meditation and its own sip of matched wine, with added transitory fragrances ( assisted by Sensory and Consumer Science Laboratory, Plant and Food Research ).   The translation and interpretations of internet sites into taste and fragrance  was based on a process of reflecting on mental equivalents: each website is a signalling system : I made a list of the emotional key-words in each of Mary’s poems, and matched each with its olfactory equivalent. I’m exploring my emotional and intuitive responses to the signals and ciphers of olfaction  that I can measure by the body  sensations that I feel when experiencing them. I’m also referring to Sassure’s view of language, and phonemes, as a system of colours.  Sassure proposed the notion of considering language as a system signalling of tones of colour, the exact shade of which is irrelevant, as long as it is clear that it is meant to be red, yellow, or green.