Dive Into An Immersive World of Colour With Google At Salone Del Mobile

How can we make sense of colour? Why do many of us experience such intensive reactions to colour despite not knowing why? Although each person has their own relationship and preference for colour combinations (the average human is estimated to be able to distinguish about 2 million different amalgamations) - which predominantly affects just one of our five senses (sight) daily - those affected by synesthesia are open to an infinite world of even more possibilities. Having the condition means your brain reroutes sensory information through multiple unrelated senses, simultaneously causing you to experience more than one sense. The short of it? People with synesthesia can associate tastes, sounds and physical entities with colours that make little sense to others. But why is this important and what relevance does it have? We may not have the direct answers but Google's new exhibition Making Sense of Colour at this year's Salone Del Mobile does.

The Salone Del Mobile 2024 installation follows on from previous exhibitions A Space For Being and Shaped by Water and will take the form of a multi-space installation, realising the sensorial qualities of colour as well as revealing how colour is a powerful aspect of Google’s latest hardware design. 'Colour is immaterial and ethereal, while sound is local and embodied', Google's collaborative partner for the exhibition, Chromasonic co-founder Johannes Girardoni, told us. 'In Chromasonic spaces we fuse colour and sound, making colour physical and felt in new ways. Participants of our experiences have expressed “feeling like a child, seeing something for the first time” or “feeling colour as if it mixed in my body.”  Merging our senses in this way is a transformative experience.'

As for visually communicating synesthesia (or a feeling at least akin to it) Google and Chromasonic's multi-layered experiential environment is hoping to translate sound frequencies to light and light frequencies to sound, with the hopes of making light audible and sound visible for all wandering guests. This, in turn, gives rise to a depth of immersion that makes each person acutely aware of the connection between their body’s subtle movements and the movement of other people within the installation. When we asked the vice president of hardware design at Google, Ivy Ross, what makes our interactions with colour so integral to such spaces, she told us: 'Each colour transmits a different vibration, and that vibration has a biological and psychological effect on us. Colour gives life a pulse and so shifting colour in a space changes the way one feels'. To put it bluntly, Making Sense of Colour isn't just an illusionary trick or an attempt at merging the senses, it will also affect attendees both physically and mentally.

As for the creative process leading up to the exhibition, Ross noted its links with the Google Hardware Design Studio and why both ventures exist to support the other. 'At the Google Hardware Design Studio, we are always considering the sensorial nature of what we design, colour being one of them', she told us. 'So this year at Salone, we wanted to explore the nature of colour. We asked ourselves the question of "what does colour sound like, feel like, look like, taste like and smell like?" We always like to offer the guest an experience at our exhibits so I reached out to Chromasonic, an arts and research lab that has developed an immersive experience that breaks the boundaries between sound and colour, and collaborated with them on an experience where you can also hear colour. Then, together with my in-house design team, we created different experiences to address each of the other sensorial natures. Our hope is that our guests walk away with a new appreciation for the power of colour to affect us on multiple levels'.

After the first series of open rooms, the viewer's experiences will shift from the ethereal to material as Chromasonic have worked with Google to reveal a set amount of spaces dedicated to not only a particular colour but also a specific sensation. Step by step, you are led on a journey by your senses - not your mind - to feast on how colour is brought to life via external factors, realised through the design of Google’s hardware portfolio, which will also be on display. 'Chromasonic environments let people lose themselves in this transformative nature of light and sound, often inducing awe', Girardoni said. 'We plan to bring both our temporary sites, such as Sensory Field, and our permanent Satellites to cities around the globe for people to develop a new and attainable sensory practice for enhanced wellbeing following this collaboration'.

If you're looking to feast on an explosion of colour then make you catch Google and Chromasonic's immersive Salone Del Mobile exhibition showing at Garage 21 in Milano, Italy from 15 - 21 April, 2024.