Abel Jansma

Love Sweat Love

Dating via smell on Museumnacht

We use all of our senses when searching for love in the wild. However, modern dating platforms are generally bad at reproducing this animalistic setting, and leave some senses unstimulated. Least represented: Smell. Not so at Mediamatic. On Museumnacht we cooperate with Lauryn Mannigel to organise a smell dating session, where you can look for love by smelling each other.

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Body Odour - Anisa Xhomaqi

Love & Olfaction

Our nose arguably couples us most directly to our environment. It is a part of the brain that is quite literally hanging outside of our body to pick up information about the world around us, and isn't filtered as much as other senses before it reaches our consciousness.
Not surprisingly then, it also plays an important role in our love life. Supposedly, our nose can subconsciously help us select a lover whose immune system nicely complements ours and who will give us strong, healthy babies. However, in many setting where we look for love, we mask our scent behind visual profiles or carefully designed commercial scents, potentially losing all the evolutionary power of smell selection.

The big Museumnacht Love Sweat Love experiment

On Museumnacht (November 5), we give you the opportunity to re-stimulate this sensational sense in the installation Love Sweat Love. This is how it works:

  • On arrival, you get a special Mediamatic smell collection kit, which extracts your personal smell.
  • While it is extracting, you can subject every other sample to careful olfactory examination and sniff your way through the smell arena.
  • On submission of your own sample, you can select and rate your favourite smells and show the donors your anonymous appreciation.
  • If there is a match, i.e. two donors like each other's smell, we get them in contact.

Join us in the olfactory dating pool!
Tickets for Museumnacht can be bought via this link. Go here to see the rest of our Museumnacht program.

Sneak Peak

Don't have time to come to the Museumnacht? Or are you interested in other olfactory artworks and stories? Join Lauryn Mannigel, Jasper de Groot, Maret Mihklepp and Caro Verbeek on Thursday November 3rd during: Odorama: The body Odour Edition. Where we will discuss our body odour prejudices, multi-sensory perception, chemical communication and bacterial perfumes. Tickets to Odorama are available via this link.

Information

Love Sweat Love at Museumnacht November 5th 20:00-23:00
(samples available to smell until November 7th)
Free entrance with a Museumnacht bracelet

Sluisdeurenloods
Mediamatic Biotoop
Dijksgracht 6
1019 BS Amsterdam