Latest OpenSky/Burr scent to be revealed later today (12 Noon EST)

Posted 07/31/12 • Last updated 07/31/12 • 0 views • 6 comments

Chandler Burr will be revealing the latest fragrance in the OpenSky project at 12 noon EST today. The fragrance was available for sale at the start of the month, without consumers knowing what the fragrance was. Burr describes the fragrance, code-named S01E02 as follows:

The verbs available for describing what works of olfactory art can do to you are myriad: they can coax (Flora), delight (Happy), alert (Terre), mesmerize (Eau de Lière) or caress (Coco Mademoiselle). They can (and I apologize for the grossly clichéd marketing term, but) seduce you (Samsara) in the very specific sense of approaching you with a sensual aesthetic as opposed to, say, chic (Candy) or elegance (Chanel N° 19) or whispering just outside the 120° visual span of the human eye (lEau dHiver).

The artist who created S01E02 is one of the most important commercial creative forces working today, an olfactory James Cameron in terms of grosses and profits. (He has made billions of dollars for the perfume industry, much more than Cameron will ever make for the movie industry.)

But he or she, of course also possesses a Cameron-esque imagination, one that is seldom let loose by commercial patrons. This patron, by contrast, had the balls to let their artist run wild, and E02 is in my opinion a work of wild, virtually magical artistry. Here is a creativity almost never seen. E02 does something few other scents can do: Force a sharp intake of breaththe jaw drops, the eyes narrowboth because of its deeply strange beauty and its deeply beautiful strangeness.

E02 is a work of olfactory science fiction. It is not merely the morphing of the eau fraîche into a 22nd century form (which would be feat enough), it is the scent of a plant, a lovely curling vine, in a garden built in outer space. It is the green scent of the plants delicate green tentacles and its graceful leaves in the precious, pressurized air circulating in cool post-metal tubes, a perfect equilibrium of the heartbreakingly natural and the mesmerizingly artificial.
E02s artist has given this plant no flower. He has referenced only the scent of its stem and leaf and tendril, the water that nourishes it, and the glowing capsule, whose marvelously synthetic sunlight protects it from the vacuum outside. (He has included the vacuum too, not its scent of coursespace has nonebut its weird phantom impact.)

Like other works Im going to include in The Untitled Series, E02, which has been on the market for years, is among the greatest of the below-the-radar great works Ive been lucky enough to come across. Its technical specs are excellent. Diffusion and structure are perfect. Persistence, given the many very light molecules I assume the artist worked with here, is admirably executed.
There is nothing else like this extraordinary futurist green that smells as if it were laced with oxygen, if oxygen had a smell. Wear it. Its not a perfume. Perfumes are things people notice. E02 is something people perceive.

And in video form:

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