Simon Knight’s creative practice sits on the border where experimental communication art and design meet. He began his career as a graphic designer but his experiences living in Berlin for 8 years and running an independent community arts space changed his artistic focus to creating experiences to conveying ideas.
Like much of his work, Knight’s project Smell Records (ongoing) was sparked by a serendipitous experience of everyday life. He was listening to a record and spilled red wine on his shirt whilst playing ‘Red, Red Wine’ by UB40. Struck by the combination of smell and sound that could trigger an emotional response, Knight developed a process of making records that can play smell and sound, capable of ‘playing’ a smell at a ‘volume’.
Knight’s aim is to arrest his audience’s interest by creating new experiences of communication that rely less on sound and vision, two senses which are so commonplace with design; his use of sound and smell in Smell Records reflects this. He believes that he can create more human and natural ways to communicate on a more experiential level, tapping into people’s emotion rather than purely imparting information.