This month, the lucky visitors at the FutureEverything festival in Manchester have a unique chance to experience the synesthetic drinking installation FlavourCollider, which will enable them to see a visualization of their neurological reaction to a cocktail’s taste.

Created by multimedia artist Marcos Lutyens and Absolut Vodka, the computer plus futuristic headpiece combine hard mathematics and science to create an extraordinary party trick. Synesthesia means mixed sensory reactions to situations that would normally just stimulate one of the senses.

Festivalgoers will be drinking Absolut cocktails, and their tasting experience will be translated into an image on a screen, computing aspects such as shape, movement, texture and form of the taste.

This is a great example how a brand can provide ways for consumers to engage in their product: by visualizing something that is naturally there (we all do that weird feeling of “seeing” a sensation in our heads when eating something delightfully yummy, or is that just me?) and moving it into the conscious grasp of the consumer. For example, Bompass & Parr have proven that synesthesia as a new approach to foods can be very popular. And even if it is too early or too complex a process for food and beverage brands to actually match the visual identity of their product with the mental image of an actual taste and increase brand recognition, it proposes a brilliant means of creating an immersive and memorable experience around something as mundane as a daily snack.

The FutureEverything festival of Art, Music & Ideas is on from 11-14 May 2011 in Manchester.

- Valerie