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A smell, a changing sound and light outside ordinary vision present three different editorial problems. The image can introduce the work. Carrying its defining quality takes another decision.

 

A PROMPT YOU CAN SMELL

 

Tomorrow’s Night Lab I at Vitra’s New York showroom includes OASIS, an experimental Hynt device presented in a scent activation with Andreas Keller.

 

The communication challenge starts at the point where the screen stops helping. Showing the apparatus introduces its appearance. Understanding the output requires an encounter.

 

For a technology brand, designing that encounter belongs inside the communications brief.

 

Night Lab I: Materials of Tomorrow

 

THE BRUSHSTROKE HAS A SOUND

 

At Roulette tonight, Liz Phillips and Heidi Howard bring live painting, sensors and aquatic recordings into one performance.

 

Here, documentation has a temporal job. It needs to preserve the relationship between an action and what follows. The finished painting cannot carry that relationship by itself.

 

For interactive work, the response deserves as much creative attention as the object.

 

Live Processing Paint and Sound

 

PAINT BEYOND SIGHT

 

Joseph Cohen’s To Be Here continues at Friedrichs Pontone through November 14. According to the gallery, nanotubes in the paintings fluoresce in short-wave infrared under particular optical conditions.

 

That does not promise a glow visitors can see unaided.

 

It does create an unusually precise storytelling problem: explain a material property without substituting an invented visual effect for it.

 

Joseph Cohen: To Be Here

 

THE SIGNAL

 

A campaign can make something easier to share while making it harder to understand.

 

Before commissioning the hero image, identify the property it cannot carry. Then design the demonstration, sequence or explanation that gives that property a route to the audience.

 

The format should preserve the reason the work matters.

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