you are the tongue
an immersive experience mixing tastes with the other senses
methods: product management, installation building, collaboration
tags: food, ASMR, sensory experiences, installation
outputs: sensory installation with touch, sound, and taste
tags: food, ASMR, sensory experiences, installation
outputs: sensory installation with touch, sound, and taste
BLACK ABSORBS ALL COLOURS. YOU ARE THE TONGUE.
Group project by Khanh Nguyen, Sarah Richmond, Gangchi Li, Qianshu Fu, Yingzhe Yang. Completed in 1 month.
Consisted of: one mouth cavity tunnel, one tongue jacket, one audio soundtrack, one taste experience.
For Unit Three, the second year of my MA in Design Products - Object Mediated Interactions at the RCA, I was given the brief of designing an immersive installation accommodating at least one person that was based on colour. My group came up with the concept BLACK ABSORBS ALL COLOURS // YOU ARE THE TONGUE, an experience involving colour, taste, touch, and sound.
Our concept is a tunnel that abstracts a mouth. The guest is the tongue. The tongue starts from the back of the mouth and experiences the taste, touch, and sound to sense colour. The tongue emerges at the lips, ready to draw and speak about the colour experience.
Group project by Khanh Nguyen, Sarah Richmond, Gangchi Li, Qianshu Fu, Yingzhe Yang. Completed in 1 month.
Consisted of: one mouth cavity tunnel, one tongue jacket, one audio soundtrack, one taste experience.
For Unit Three, the second year of my MA in Design Products - Object Mediated Interactions at the RCA, I was given the brief of designing an immersive installation accommodating at least one person that was based on colour. My group came up with the concept BLACK ABSORBS ALL COLOURS // YOU ARE THE TONGUE, an experience involving colour, taste, touch, and sound.
Our concept is a tunnel that abstracts a mouth. The guest is the tongue. The tongue starts from the back of the mouth and experiences the taste, touch, and sound to sense colour. The tongue emerges at the lips, ready to draw and speak about the colour experience.
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We wanted our experience to be fully in black, so that guests aren’t primed with a colour. Through the sensory experience, they sense the colours that were absorbed by black, and then draw out the colours they experience.
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After putting on the headphones with our audio soundtrack and the jacket that will onboard them into the experience of the tongue, guests slowly sit on the mat at the entrance, the back of the mouth. They become the tongue. The tongue pushes through the velvet curtains and lies down until they've entered the mouth cavity. The tongue wriggles in and the curtains close around them, so they are immersed in an entirely dark cavern that is soft and fleshy. Hanging in black nylon stockings in the first part are different textures that the tongue can reach out to feel. The second part has hard foam cutouts, approximating teeth. The audio takes guests through the experience.
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Towards the end of the experience, tongues are passed to them a plate containing crayons with different tastes on top of them. The tongue is encouraged to lick (or, if they are uncomfortable, sniff) the crayon in the dark to find the taste that is most similar to the textures they have experienced. Then, the tongue uses the crayon(s) chosen to draw the experience on the plate. After giving back the plate, the tongue exits the experience and views the colours that came out.
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The tongue jacket was designed with the surfaces of the tongue in mind: scratchy versus smooth. There is an extra long hood attachment that will help obscure the guests' vision once draped over.
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Our concept also touches on the aspect of mindful eating. One of our groupmates struggled with an eating disorder in the past, and found the idea of mindful eating, really slowing down to experience the taste, texture, sounds, and sense experience of the food, instead of rushing through eating, really helped her. Through our experience, we wanted guests to slow down and experience what it was like to be a tongue, slipping through a mouth.
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"Twisting, tasting, texture-touching tongue. Hungry tongue, thirsty tongue, eager to explore tongue. What tastes do you feel? What colours do you taste? Think about them. Remember them. You will need to tell your tale. The tale of the tongue." |
Early on, our group realized that we were interested in the relationship between colour and taste. We started our early experiments with simple colour-taste associations. In our first exercise, we used crayons to express our colour associations when we thought of some of the basic tastes: sweet, salty, bitter, sour, umami, and spicy. In our next set of experiments, we wanted to recreate a blind taste test, so each group member bought a snack without showing the other, and we sat in a circle and tasted the snacks, drawing out what we sensed.
Some insights we found: we were able to reach some similar conclusions about colour and taste associations, although cultural differences could count for deviation, for example brown coloured as sour from a classmate from India, who thought of tamarind. Also, it was difficult to separate taste from other things such as texture, sound, and sense memory.
As we moved from experimentation to research, we found some research papers looking into these associations, which have reached conclusions that there are generally agreed-upon colours for each taste, such as pink for sweet, black for bitter, white-blue for salty, yellow-green for sour. Interestingly enough, these resonated with the experiments we conducted ourselves. Colour-taste synesthetes (the rarest form of synesthesia) also commonly agree with the public on these associations.
As we moved from experimentation to research, we found some research papers looking into these associations, which have reached conclusions that there are generally agreed-upon colours for each taste, such as pink for sweet, black for bitter, white-blue for salty, yellow-green for sour. Interestingly enough, these resonated with the experiments we conducted ourselves. Colour-taste synesthetes (the rarest form of synesthesia) also commonly agree with the public on these associations.
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In our first play on the idea, we created the concept 'Bittersweet'. It came from the idea that while it may be difficult for others to agree on one colour associated for a taste (for example, sweet got a range, from pink to orange to red to purple), it may be easier for agreement on what a colour and taste association isn't. Pink isn't bitter, and black isn't sweet. We wanted to create a concept that surprises the audience, by creating a dual set of pink and black rooms, but with the associations inverted. The pink room was cramped and bitter-smelling, while the black room was cozy and sweet-smelling. As a demo test, we gave oversteeped tea to guests in the pink room and sweetened water to guests in the black room.
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While the concept was interesting to play with, we wanted to develop the project in a direction where the end result was subtler and more ambiguous, while still keeping that playful, unexpected experience. We decided we didn't want to pigeonhole a forced colour-taste association onto the guest, but instead wanted to see what range of colours we could tease out through senses other than sight. After many rounds of ideation, workshopping, experimentation, and playing around, we evolved the concept into BLACK ABSORBS ALL COLOURS // YOU ARE THE TONGUE.
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The final concept was started on and completed in 2 weeks. There were a couple of failures and discarded ideas on the way. For example, we really wanted to give guests black jellies of different flavours to taste as they went through the tunnel, and originally the tunnel was designed as a crawlspace. However, we decided it would be a more interesting experience for guests to be constrained by having to wriggle on their back and then lie down and experience the textures, and at that point, adding a taste sensation was too overwhelming on top of all the other experiences. We added that taste association back in through the crayon step. As a next step, we definitely would want to develop that aspect further, playing with the element of taste-crayons and maybe thinking through how to incorporate the black jellies.
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Here are some other work in progress pictures of how we developed the concept in the last two weeks!
This project was my first experience creating an immersive spatial installation, so I learned a lot about how to transfer ideas quickly from concept to big space. It was also a lot of fun working with a group of designers who had similar interests but different skillsets and inspirations. Our group meetings were lessons in compassion, empathy, humility, learning to be wrong, and understanding how to bring different mindsets into one shared vision.
This project was my first experience creating an immersive spatial installation, so I learned a lot about how to transfer ideas quickly from concept to big space. It was also a lot of fun working with a group of designers who had similar interests but different skillsets and inspirations. Our group meetings were lessons in compassion, empathy, humility, learning to be wrong, and understanding how to bring different mindsets into one shared vision.
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Black absorbs all colours. You are the tongue.
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