In what might be the most creative use of a Raspberry Pi computer, multimedia artist Adnan Aga has created an interactive sculpture called the Adnose. The premise is simple—give the Adnose something to “smell,” and a paper that poetically describes the aroma comes out of its nostril.
Of course, the sculpture can’t really smell anything. It uses a Raspberry Pi camera module (plus a fisheye lens) to snap a photo of whatever’s held under its nostril. The photo is processed through Google Lens for identification, and from there, a GPT-4 language model writes a creative and poetic description.
This may seem like a funny little art installation, but there’s actually a lot of depth to the Adnose. Its creator, Adnan Aga, was born with anosmia—the inability to smell. Adnan describes this sculpture as a “prosthetic” and hopes that it will draw attention to often-overlooked anosmic community.
The Adnose debuted during a “smell-and-tell” event at the Olfactory Art Keller in New York’s Chinatown, where several other smell-related pieces reside. Adnan created the sculpture for his graduate thesis at NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts Interactive Telecommunications Program, and as you might expect, it was very well-received.
You can read more about the Adnose at Adnan’s LinkedIn and on the Olfactory Art Keller website. Note that the sculpture is still located in the Olfactory Art Keller’s Cubiculum Odoratus during regular hours.
Source: Adnan Aga via The Raspberry Pi Foundation
