AFTERTASTE 3

It is not hard to imagine an apartment whose layout would depend no longer on the activities of the day, but on functional relationships between the rooms... It takes a little more imagination, no doubt, to picture an apartment whose layout was based on the functioning of the senses. We can imagine well enough what a gustatorium might be, or an auditorium, but one might wonder what a visuorium might look like, or an olfactorium or a palporium. Georges Perec, "The Apartment", Species of Spaces and Other Pieces [1974] London: Penguin Books 1997, 31. AFTERTASTE 3 the annual international symposium dedicated to the critical review of Interior Design, intends to provoke a discussion about the richness of the senses and their role in the comprehension of space and inhabitation. Experimental in character, this conference aims to consider projects and ideas that stem from investigations into the workings of the senses. Writer Georges Perec famously urged us to imagine separate rooms for taste, hearing, sight, smell and touch, yet one might also inversely challenge the primacy of visual perception by bringing the more peripheral and intertwined aspects of sensory experience into focus. AFTERTASTE 3 will feature accomplished designers, architects, and artists whose work specifically addresses the complex and still relatively unexplored role of sentient perception in the imagining of interiors Parsons The New School for Design