FuoriSalone 2024, Google installation | Elle Decor

During the week of the Salone del Mobile 2024, Google he collaborated with the Californian experimental art studio Chromasonic to launch an interactive exhibition entitled Making Sense of Color. This immersive installation, located at Garage 21 in Via Archimede, 26, extends over 600 square meters of a renovated industrial space near Porta Venezia (accessible until April 21).

FuoriSalone 2024 – entrance to the Making Sense of Color by Google installation

The ambition of this installation is clear: not to simply show colour, but to make it come alive in a total way, allowing visitors to feel it, listen to it, experience it. It is an invitation to get lost in a labyrinth of 21 rooms, each outlined by semi-translucent panels that become theater in a ballet of LED lights that change hue following the rhythm of the sound frequencies. It’s a journey into synesthesiathat phenomenon so dear to artists and poets, where the senses mix in a multisensory dance.

Ivy Ross, visionary Vice President of Design, UX and Research for Google’s Hardware Products group, in her opening speech, eloquently illustrated how color can shape not only our emotions and moods, but how it can be used to weave a more intimate and profound connection with our daily living environments. The installation thus becomes a sort of laboratory to study how colors can manipulate precise and targeted sensory responses.

Interior of the Making Sense of Color exhibition

Johannes Girardonico-founder of Chromasonic, then explored the technology that animates the installation: the Chromasonic Refrequencing. Through a sophisticated game of algorithms, this system allows light waves to be converted into sound waves and vice versa, offering an experience in which light and sound blend and travel together. “Let’s make itThe audible is visible and the visible is audible” said Girardoni, describing a fusion of senses that amplifies the interaction with the surrounding space and enhances the sensorial perception of individuals, without resorting to artificial tools such as AR viewers.

How does the color appear? Sensory experience at the Making Sense of Color exhibition

In addition to stimulating sight and hearing, Making Sense of Color provokes and stimulates the other senses. The second part of the exhibition is a suite of rooms where color is explored through taste, smell and touch. It is an invitation to a broader sensorial dialogue: What sensation does the color give? What does it look like? What does it smell like? And what does it taste like? In this segment of the exhibition, visitors are encouraged to touch and feel objects, to recognize their weight and shape, discovering how these aspects can awaken memories of specific colors. Other rooms offer visual projections and olfactory bouquets that transport you to distant spaces, from serene skies dotted with clouds to the fresh scent of a flowery spring.

During the preview, Ivy Ross shared a personal anecdote, recounting how her childhood purple bedroom shaped her aesthetic sensibilities and career. This personal experience shows how colors are not just a matter of visual perception, but they play a crucial role in influencing and shaping our experiences and life paths.

What does the color smell like? Sensory experience at the Making Sense of Color exhibition

In conclusion, Making Sense of Color is not simply presented as an art installation; It’s a social and sensorial exploration that poses profound questions about how we perceive and interact with the world. With this exhibition, Google and Chromasonic invite visitors to the FuoriSalone to reflect on how design and colors can improve our daily perception and enrich human experience in ways that go beyond the visible, into the deep fabric of our daily existence.

Making Sense of Color
GARAGE 21
in Via Archimede 26
from 16 to 21 April from 10:00 to 17:30

Galileo Morandi, architect born in 1986, lives and works in Los Angeles. He studied architecture at the Polytechnic University of Milan and at the Southern California Institute of Architecture (Sci-Arc). After several years of work spent under the scorching sun of the Middle East, he moved to Los Angeles in search of warmer climates and new adventures. He loves robots, artificial intelligence and Jazz, he hates white cubes in all their possible variations architectural. His work sits at the intersection of computational thinking, politics and ecology in design and architecture. He is not a regular visitor to social media, but you can find him as @galileomorandi.