Taraneh Naddafi is an award winning licensed Architect in California.She acquired her master degree in architecture and continuing educations in Vienna University of Technology and Tehran Azad University. She is an olfactory designer and currently explores independently and in collaboration how aromas powerfully trigger images and emotions through art and architecture.Her collaborations in more than ten AIA awarded projects, International architectural design competitions and ecological modular structures are featured in IDEAT, California Home+Design, Elle Décor and books about micro architectures.She has a passion for material research, environmental building techniques, the fusion of sensual aesthetics and unfolding the world of scents. This manifests in a hands-on approach and experiences that engage all senses. She is passionate about using art and architecture to generate awareness and dialogue about our new shared reality of climate change, sea level rise and the importance of cultivating resilience as we transition into our new future.For Taraneh, the individual character of each design manifests through integrating spatial relations, celebrating authenticity of materials and the geophysical/climactic/ecological/cultural systems of the place.She emphasizes the importance of these aspects of the spirit of the place in a non-dual frame as catalysts for the emerging PERFORMative* design.
Jai Haissmani is a Body Mind hacker,commissioned stone sculptor, founder of Affective Interfaces, a multiple award winning emotion sensing technology company, and Rolfer / Somatic Experiencing Practitioner fusing the phenomenological with the philosophical. He graduated with a degree in philosophy from UCSC in 1995 and has presented multiple times at Stanford, for the FTC, and Institute for the Future on using technology to study human emotion.Working with the medium of embodied experience and connective tissue structure, and their relationship to technology, Jai targets deep experiential perspectival shift in embodied consciousness. He uses temporal shift in memory processing to prevent the past from hijacking the now. Embodiment shifts the locus of power from Foucault’s conditioned Power-Knowledge to self-referencing not only as subversion but as proactive creative agency. He is currently exploring how embodied narratives shift relationality to the self and other, and how technology has diminished empathy but can be used to enhance it; how the atavistic can adaptively coexist with technology, and coherence in top down and bottom up processing. His interested in this project is primarily in how the apprehension of the foreign is shaped by resilience, ontological depth and breadth, and the individual’s and group’s empathetic range.
ENDO/EXO (GEN[i] OUS)
We are called to explore the questions:
— How the foreign can emerge from within?
— How can the foreign become native?
— How does the exogenous become endogenous? The endogenous the exogenous?
We use these conceptual frameworks to explore foreignness:
· Endosymbiont (mitochondrial) evolution: how billions of years ago single celled organisms absorbed another single celled organism with its own DNA to symbiotically provide the basic energy molecule ATP.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Endosymbiont
· How exogenous water asteroids seeded Earth’s oceans… The story of WATER: its cataclysmic arrival as alien molecule, eventual insemination with life, its rises, freezes and falls from global temperature change, its symbolization in the human psyche as an archetype of subsuming oceanic emotionality and relationship to the feminine as a source of life.
· We are calling those willing to phenomenologically engage their curious embodied mind to sensually immerse themselves in a perspectival shift: from the microcosmic to the macrocosmic contexts of foreignness; using microcosmic frames of cellular matrices (e.g.endosymbiont theory), and the personal illusion of the separate self, through macrocosmic frames of cultural perceptions of otherness in determining foreignness, ecosystem interdependencies, terraforming of earth and extraterrestrial landscapes as exemplars of foreignness.
· We use the lenses of shamanic narrative, conservation, Schopenhauer’s notion of the sublime, sen/scent(ual) olfactory representation, and BIOPHILIC (life loving) Eros (pleasure seeking) vs NECROPHILIC (loving destruction) Thanatos (death seeking) dialectics.
· We juxtapose the endo vs exogenous to frame the dynamics of foreignness as a disruptive and destructive genius to explore ethno-cultural, ecosystem, global warming, Industrial Age evolutions.
Traumatic overwhelm
Exogenous
Waking up into amnesia
We do this by telling a story through a botanist/climatologist’s eyes. Recently traumatized with a concussion, afflicted by amnesia from an impact from a foreign object, we explore various conceptual frameworks of foreignness through:
1. A short story as a graphic novelette to examine how exogenous and foreign objects transform the perspective of our protagonist. They get amnesia from an impact while doing research on effects of climate change on sea level rise; a concussion causes them to lose their memory and sense of smell. Tragically their essential research is lost to the amnesia, but in an effort to recover memory, they discover an archivist and scholar who has preserved essential oils and the DNA of some plant species that have been submerged. Set ~200 years in the future, much of the world is under water, and much plant life is either gone or hydroponic. Consequently, the sensual richness of original smells have been lost, also as a result of over-hybridization, or replacement with synthetic copies. The evocative power of smell helps our protagonist recover their memory, and essential research.
2. To tell this story, we use an integration of multiple scents proximal to artistic installations to crystallize in the audience an interactive olfactory experience inspired from important moments in the short story.
· We are exploring a new dimension in the overlooked sense of smell by helping the audience reflect on how primal our aromatic memory is in the context of a narrative, and the narrative of our lives
3. Collaborate with other artists to create multi-modal multimedia “scentual“ installations
· We are calling this acSCENTuation: including the underutilized and overlooked olfactory sense for multimodal expression. A scentual conceptual art collaboration
We are called to untangle the nuanced mechanisms by which the foreign makes and takes LIFE. And how the emergent properties of SOUL (the essential self, discovered through the process of introspection and becoming) alchemically reconnect the self (the sense of a separate I), evolving through the feeling of being alien-disconnected to a WHOLE from which Nothing is separate.
Remembering
