Each year, Gluon hosts a solo exhibition featuring one of the winners of the NTAA (New Technological Art Award), organized by the Liedts-Meesen Foundation. Last year, the artist Peter De Cupere was awarded the prize, and this year we are proud to present his exhibition Sensory Interfaces.
The exhibition Sensory Interfaces offers visitors a groundbreaking experience that fuses olfactory art with augmented reality (AR). It builds on the rich history of media arts and its pursuit of multi-sensory experiences, including touch, taste and immersive visuals. Referencing pioneering augmented reality installations such as the Golden Calf (1994) by Jeffrey Shaw —artist Peter de Cupere pushes these boundaries even further encouraging visitors to discover scent compositions in harmony with AR creations. Works like The Secret and Human Red Flower, a red flower hidden inside a high heel, use AR and scent to evoke powerful emotional responses. Odours attract, repulse and warn and function as fact signifiers carrying instinctive messages. The exhibition invites visitors to rethink how we engage with both art and the world around us, suggesting a future where digital technologies can also touch other senses, challenging the world of research into sensory interfaces as well as exciting developments into immersive art.
The exhibition featuring new and already existing VR pieces will be produced for Gluon (23/2/2025 until 16/3/2025) and for Stichting Liedts Meessen (23/03/2025 to 31/5/2025).
ABOUT PETER DE CUPERE
Peter de Cupere, an olfactory artist with over 20 years of experience, has created 700+ scent-related artworks exploring social, cultural, and environmental themes. His works have featured in 200+ global exhibitions, and he has lectured worldwide. A professor at PXL-MAD School of Arts in Hasselt, he co-founded the Open Lab for sensory exploration. In 2018, he won the London Golden Pear Award for his contribution to promote the use of scent in art. Earning a PhD in 2019, he researched smell as an artistic concept at UHasselt, PXL-MAD, and VUB Brussels.
WORKSHOP FROM SCENT TO SCULPTURE
Close your eyes and smell… The smell of freshly cut grass hangs in the air. Immediately you get the warm feeling that comes with those first days of spring. You open the book you just bought in the bookstore and the smell of unread pages meets you. You can’t wait to dive into the story. Recognizable? Our sense of smell has a strong memory that allows us to link specific smells to certain moments, objects or events.
During this workshop you will browse through the fragrance collection of artist Peter De Cupere from his interactive exhibition Sensory Interfaces. Each scent is associated with an object that the visitor can discover in Augmented Reality.
Now it’s up to you to smell mindfully. You design your own zine that tells your scent memory. Starting from no more than what the sense of smell perceives, you then create your own 3D object via AI prompting. The result is presented in Augmented Reality and can be accessed with a QR code in your zine. In this way, scent creates a digital range of unique sculptures of everyone’s personal scent experience.
