Two blocks from the World Trade Center in lower Manhattan on a plaza facing the East River, behind a gleaming mall, sits a temporary museum. Or that is what Glade, a brand of SC Johnson, is calling it. The Museum of Feelings is housed in a small building with shifting colored lights projected on its white walls. Tuesday night, its opening night, a young man in black clothes ushers confused people inside or makes them wait at the door when it becomes too crowded.
The subway advertisements for the Museum promise only a URL, a street address, and the dates the exhibit is open. If your curiosity is sufficiently piqued by these ads or the Facebook event and you visit TheMuseumofFeelings.com, the first thing you are cued to do is to create a MoodLens — a “living, emotional portrait that changes to reflect feelings,” the page explains. If you click “Get Started,” your computer’s built-in camera will photograph your face and with another click, your computer’s microphone can pick up your voice. This data is collected along with the weather in your current location and the “general feelings on social media in your region” to calculate your mood.
“Real-time data points to you feeling oh so optimistic,” said my results. The MoodLens filtered the photo of my blank face with blurry and high contrast effects, then added a translucent layer of orange and yellow.
OPTIMISTIC
You can't help but sport your favorite pair of rose-colored shades when you're rocking this kind of optimism. With an outlook this positive, nothing can even come close to raining on your parade.
Scent has been known to influence how you're feeling. Look to aromas of grapefruit and watermelon when you want to take a walk on the even brighter side.
Never mind that my actual state was eating tortilla chips and guacamole while lounging on my couch. Armed with this photo for social media, this MoodLens can change colors and moods every day for a week which means I could sport Optimism or other Glade-articulated emotions as a public accessory instead of, say, “tired” or “pretty okay with eating guacamole.” The site collects and aggregates this information to describe the collective “mood” of the city.
The colors projected onto the exterior of the museum are said to change with that accumulated emotion. Our feelings, as calculated by this algorithm, are art, as understood by Glade. Inside the museum, words on the wall (what would normally be called a didactic panel) introduce us to the project: “Open up to an emotional journey. Use your eyes, ears, fingers, imagination, soul and nose. . . . . Twist your inner muse to ‘on.’ Be Brave, Beautiful, Colorful, Vulnerable.”
The first room is down a short dark hallway where a young woman greets me. "Welcome to Optimistic," she said, wearing a black dress with a white harness on top of it. She hands me a square paper with holograms on one side. "You can use this side to play with the light, the other side to scratch and sniff."
The Optimistic room is a curtained-off pink space with many corners, around the size of my small Brooklyn living room. A podium in the center holds a rotating mirrored pyramid that throws small triangles of light on the walls. Optimism has a lot of triangles. In the Glade Emotional universe, feelings are best understood in graphic, geometric shapes. The room is full of a scent — it smells something like green — but I couldn’t hear the docent’s explanation to the people ahead of me in line of what it was supposed to be. We hear twinkly sounds and strings repeat three notes in a major chord. It recalls a Disney love scene, as though we're hearing Snow White wake up. Small groups of people take photos of the room and each other, then move on.
“Welcome to Joyful," says a different woman in black, handing me 3D glasses at the next room. “Enjoy the scent beacons of balsam and fir as you enter a forest of your imagination.” A mirrored room, Joyful feels bigger than optimism. It smells like a Christmas-tree-shaped rear-view air freshener. From the ceiling hangs long green strings of light that you can push to the side or take a diagonal path that cuts through to the other side. The glasses distort my spatial awareness just enough to be annoying. A stray winter glove lies on the ground.
Invigorated comes next, full of blue light and dance music. A kid runs speed trials around his dad while others take more photographs. After that, ramping up the register of feeling, Exhilarated is full of mirrors at angles designed to look like you are inside a kaleidoscope. At a mirrored hub in the center of the room you can play with an iPad to move the images at varying speeds along the ceiling. The scent of “blooming peony and cherry” is pumped out from the hub. The music is what it would sound like if elevators could have dream sequences in an ‘80s movie.
The last emotion is Calm (lavender and vanilla), a light round room with fog moving across the floor. If other feelings begat triangles, serenity meant circles. It is how a high school junior would recreate a James Turrell show. I looked to see if the room's visitors were calm. No. They looked occupied taking photos of themselves in the white smoke.
All this is to funnel us into the nadir of the experience: the white-walled gift shop. On the far wall, you are to buy a Glade candle for each emotion’s scent in a small white designer box with white letters that read: Museum of Feelings. Folks are crowded around the counter. To the right, charts and photographs of MoodLenses and numerical breakdowns of the city’s mood in what they call the Living Gallery. To the left, several of the museum’s employees wear black visor hats with cut-outs that make a half-cage shape on their head.
Toward the exit, a woman around her early forties with blond hair set in waves stands in front of a tall white machine. A man in a cage-hat helps her work the machine to take MoodLens. She smiles. The cage-hat man crops the photo into her face and a filter cranked up the contrast, the levels, the blur radius and added a blue glow. You can tell it was a woman's face, recognizable perhaps if you were looking for someone you knew, but the blond woman I see has been churned out of the shot. "Refreshed." The machine decides. "Well, refreshed!” She laughs. “That's not bad." Then she clicks yes for the machine’s permission to use this MoodLens in the exhibit's Living Gallery.
In 2012, Turkish novelist Orhan Pamuk created a museum in Istanbul based on a fictional museum in his novel, The Museum of Innocence. The Museum of Innocence, both in the novel and in real life, placed previously hoarded mementos of broken love on display. A monument to making private sentimentality public, its subject was memory. It was about presenting the ephemera we collect and keep to honor it as lasting. The Museum of Feelings is the opposite of that.
The Museum borrows some trends from the contemporary art world's aesthetics, but in postmodern art and architecture, creating haptic or sensory experiences is supposed to go hand-in-hand with non-hierarchical and democratic politics. They’re designed to make you “interact,” which was what fascism wouldn't let you do. (No matter that fascist aesthetics is full of communal, haptic experiences.) Your body is supposed to be more immediate, the logic goes; it’s specifically unmediated by an authority telling you what to think. In this voluntary building-sized advertising experience for candles, another literary analogy might be closer than The Museum of Innocence. In a Brave New World, the “feelies” was a form of mass entertainment like the movies but with added senses like smell. It soothed and stimulated audiences. Mostly it kept them busy. It too left the mind untouched.
