The Sensory Terroir of Crossmodal Art

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Connecting the Senses through Wine and Sound

The Sensory Terroir of Crossmodal Art explores how our senses converge in making and experiencing art. It introduces crossmodal art as a new category of creative practice blending multiple senses. Drawing on the interconnectivity of wine terroir, the book provides a non-hierarchical framework for navigating multisensory aesthetic experience, from immersive art to wine tasting.

This innovative, interdisciplinary volume bridges the fertile experiential and theoretical fields of art and creative practice with contemporary scientific understandings of crossmodality in psychology, neuroscience, and sensory science. It focuses on crossmodal art created at the nexus of hearing with taste and smell – senses often excluded from definitions of art. Case studies reveal correspondences between sounds – from music to field recordings – and the culturally rich yet aesthetically contested sensory experience of wine. From these, the book develops practical and adaptable tools, which include sensory mapping systems and contemplative techniques that readers can use to both conceptualise multisensory experience and create crossmodally.

e Sensory Terroir of Crossmodal Art is relevant to scholars of sensory studies, art and aesthetics, sound studies and musicology, design, museology, anthropology, psychology, and neuroscience, as well as wine, food, and marketing researchers. It will also be of interest to artists and musicians, curators, experience designers, brand strategists, and drinks and hospitality professionals who wish to employ evidence-based, non-visual multisensory methods.

ZAAFA 2023 Premier Award

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Jo Burzynska was announced as the Premier Award at this year’s Zonta Ashburton Female Art Awards (ZAAFA) for the Mechanised Quarter audio-olfactory installation from her 2022 exhibition, What Might We Find When We Stop Looking? Jo was the overall winner out of 29 finalists, winning prize money and the invitation to present a solo show at the Ashburton Art Gallery in March 2024.

Mechanised Quarter was created using insights from a series of walks with members of the community exploring the city of Ōtautahi Christchurch using the non visual senses. It highlights the often overlooked sensory experiences of the city at a time of rebuilding after its devastating earthquakes. The sensory interplay between sound and scent encourages a nonvisual understanding of space and aims to foster alternative connections with urban environments.

“It was wonderful to receive this acknowledgment for my work,” Burzynska said, “As art is still so visually dominated, it was even more rewarding that a predominantly audio-olfactory work won this award. I hope this is indicative of the growing acceptance and celebration of art – and knowledge more generally – generated outside the visual realm.”

Images above: Jo with ZAAFA 2023 judges Lauren Gutsell, Kairauhī Curator at Dunedin Public Art Gallery; Professor Jane Venis, artist and academic; and Caroline McQuarrie, artist and Senior Lecturer in Photography at Whiti o Rehua School of Art Massey University (left) & interactions with the work at the ZAAFA 2023 exhibition (right).

Risonanze di Vino – book published

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Risonanze di Vino cover smallRisonanze di Vino:
Exploring the Sensory Terroir of Rural Italy

Editor: Jo Burzynska
Contributors: Jo Burzynska, Gaetano Carboni, Leandro Pisano
Publisher: Interferenze Book Series

Risonanze di Vino, a book documenting two of my wine and sound projects in Italy, has now been published as part of the Interferenze Book Series and is available to purchase here.

About Risonanze di Vino
Risonanze di Vino explores the multiple connections made through a series of artist residencies in rural Italy that unite the senses, culture, and nature, as framed within discussions of the Anthropocene. It documents the residencies – conducted as creative sensory research – through which the multisensory artist Jo Burzynska, identifies and tunes resonances between sound and wine through an interlaced sensuous system that she calls sensory terroir.

Credit: Daniela d'Arielli / Pollinaria

Credit: Daniela d’Arielli / Pollinaria

Organised by the Interferenze art research platform in the Irpinia and Sannio regions, and the Pollinaria agricultural residency programme in Abruzzo, the projects were oriented by the artist’s immersions in cultural and personal sensory experience within these agrarian environments. The residencies resulted in sense-focused artworks in which soundscapes – created from field recordings of the winegrowing environments – play in crossmodal harmony or conversation with the local wines.

IMG_5851The projects are contextualised within current discourse around the Anthropocene through the curatorial contributions from Interferenze’s Leandro Pisano and Pollinaria’s Gaetano Carboni. If the Anthropocene is a sensorial phenomenon, sound art could be well placed to expose symbiotic coexistences and initiate resonances that shift perceptions.

Assessing Oenosthesia: Blending Sound and Wine

Recent developments in neuroscience and psychology have confirmed what many artists have long intuited, that our senses are connected. Research into crossmodal correspondences – the universal tendency of a sensory feature in one modality to be matched with one from another sensory modality – has highlighted strong connections between flavour and sound that has only just begun to be explored by artists working in these sensory realms. This paper investigates Oenosthesia, a practice-led art research project that aims to harness crossmodal correspondences in an artwork that combines a soundscape created from field recordings of the winemaking process with wines consumed as part of the piece. Its success in achieving this was tested through data gathered from participants at presentations of the work in London in September 2016 and in Sydney in March 2017. This paper presents the results of this study, which suggest that sound can significantly change perceptions of flavour and highlights the potential for the design of crossmodally congruent sound works that heighten specific flavour characters of a wine.

 

Oenosthesia soundscape: the international blend

This version of Oenosthesia was a remix of the original using wines and their sounds from different regions around the world. It was presented at Studio Sienko in London in September 2016 and Black Box, University of New South Wales Art & Design in Sydney in 2017, from which feedback was gathered for this study. For a full multisensory experience, listen to while tasting a sparkling wine followed by a rich Pinot Gris and then a full bodied red.