ANI LIU: I like to challenge my audience
with sensory experiences that can almost feel threatening.
[dramatic electronic music]
I always use hair, spit, semen, blood.
Why do you find it disgusting?
Why is that normal?
Why are things so sanitized?
I think as an artist I'm really interested in all things
sensory, especially as it relates to perception.
And with things like virtual reality and augmented reality,
it's so interesting that you can kind
of reprogram that perception.
So the empathy machines are a set of headsets that allowed
two people to swap vision.
They're equipped with tiny cameras that they use
for drones, actually, and video glasses,
and they're programmed with radio frequency to swap feeds.
So you could look out through my eyes
and I would look out through yours.
When you look at something, light bounces off that object
and reflects into your retina and it
becomes-- processes the image.
But when you smell something, a molecule of that substance
binds into your receptor and, in my mind, becomes a part of you.
The project Human Perfume started very ambitiously
with the goal of growing a plant that
could always create the scent profile of someone that
had loved and lost.
And it turns out it was a very complicated process.
But along the way, I learned a lot of other techniques
which allowed me to create a chemical reamalgamation
of someone's smell.
First, I take someone's shirt or garment
that they've been wearing for a really long time
and then I cut strips of it that are the stinkiest
and I put them in a solvent.
And then I distill it from very traditional ways,
like with glassware.
There's something so inherently sensual about smell.
I think in the current landscape that we're in,
it's really important to come back
to these sensual experiences.
I really love revealing the invisible, actually,
everything from the microscopic scale to the, I guess,
telescopic scale.
With the microbial pieces that are self-portraits that I grew
from my body, I was really interested in forces
that co-make me beyond myself.
I was talking to a microbiologist
and he was telling me about the microbiome for the first time
and I was so blown away.
For every 10 cells in your body, nine of them are not your own.
They're invisible, but basically live
on every surface of your body and influence everything
from your behavior to your mood and it's such an integral part
of who you are.
I started to grow my own cultures
just to see what they were.
What do they look like from my armpit?
What do they smell like?
What do they look like from my belly button?
What does it look like from my partner?
You use agar, which is a gelatin,
and put in a bunch of nutrients and you set into a jelly
into a Petri dish.
I would dip a sterile Q-tip in DI water and then plate it.
And then you incubate it, which means you keep it
nice and toasty at the perfect temperature
that it wants to be at.
I had always thought of myself as a nature versus nurture kind
of paradigm.
But the fact that a totally different
organism could also co-make me was really fascinating.
I think it's especially important in the technological
landscape to include artists because, you know,
scientists and technologists strive so hard to make
the world a better place.
And so much of what I strive to do is ask, what is better?
Who is better?
Who is it better for?
Is it better for you, for me, for a child, for a man?
These are really charged questions
that I think artists can fearlessly
ask when they use these media.