These mask were made together with my teammate Myrthe Winkel. We used synesthesia as our inspiration. Synesthesia is a phenomenon a small group of people experience. They associate different numbers, smells or sounds with other sences. For example, a person with synesthesia can hear a name and get a taste in their mouth they associate with that name.
With these masks we wanted people without synesthesia to expierence synesthesia for themselves and somehow train them. You start out with the silver mask. Inside the mask, ledstrips are installed. There is also a little tube that will inject smell into the mask. The tube is conected to an air pumping device. The tubes are put in a jar with a certain smell. When the smell is pumped in the mask, a person on the outside changes the colour of the ledstrips. This way the person in the mask will start to associate a certain colour with a certain smell.
In the colourfull mask you get an undisclosed smell. By pressing the red button you can have the different coloured pieces of plastic rotate in front of your sight. When the subject gets a smell they have had in the silver mask, they will put the colour they associate with that smell in front of their sight.
The goal is to train the test subject with the silver mask by having them get used to a combination of smell and colour. So used that the subjects will make the same corralation of colour in smell with the coloufull mask.
It started with a tissue box where you could insert colourfull pieces of paper. Soon Myrthe and I realised we wanted to work with lights. We thought white would reflect the light better. But black gave a more secluded feeling. Ultimately we chose white for the actual mask to make the whole thing feel more Sci-Fi.
There was a lot of experimenting and sketching involved in the form of the mask. We had to think about the techniques we could inculde, but also what we wanted to convey with out masks. We knew we wanted to make the training mask very spacey and Sci-Fi, while the colourfull glasses are more "wearable" in daily life.
