empathic little tree friend
2021


The work empathic little tree friend, 2021 refers to a study on empathy in dogs. According to this study, dogs reflect human emotions by smelling them. They react fearfully when they smell human fear sweat, joyfully when the smell is emitted in joy, which is read by humans as empathy. This observation is applied to a so-called "miracle tree": A sensor detects the smell of the person driving, the tree duplicates it: an empathetic passenger. Scented trees for cars were invented in 1952 in Watertown, New York with the smell of pine and are known in Europe as Wunder-Baum, Arbre Magique and Little Trees. The car interiors around those trees have since been filled with software, "miracle trees" have unchanged their position. The empathic little tree friend is a "tech-solutionism"-like proposal.

130x175x3cm