Filled with sounds, smells and interactive installations, the second London Design Biennale offers visitors a sensory exploration of the world, intended as an antidote to the "island mentality" of Brexit.

"We obviously live in a very emotionally turbulent and politically polarized time and the choice of theme was intended to reflect and confront that," said Christopher Turner, artistic director of the exhibition, which this year has the theme "Emotional States."

Barely a few months before Britain leaves the European Union in March 2019, the biennale is "intended as a corrective to that island mentality," Turner said.

He said the event, which opens at Somerset House on Tuesday and runs until Sept. 23, shows that "London is open, not only to business but to the creative community."

The exhibition includes installations from 40 countries, from China to Canada and Saudi Arabia, allowing visitors to take the pulse of the world.

One uses video projections to put them at the virtual center of an indigo production site in India, accompanied by the noise of the workers and the earthy smell of the indigo.

Another exhibit, inspired by the humid climate of Riga, allows visitors to write on a window covered in condensation, listening to the sounds of a battering storm and the smells of a Latvian forest.

It is intended to "show the existence of nature in our daily lives and hopefully make us re-evaluate the importance of it," said curator Arthur Analts.

The Hong Kong exhibit includes painted paper which, when scratched, unleashes smells of opium or roast duck.

It highlights the link between smell and memories, in a nod to novelist Marcel Proust, for whom the taste of a Madeleine cake brought childhood memories rushing in.

Playful exhibits

Many exhibits are playful, such as the Greek work "Disobedience," a theme that evokes the myths of Icarus, Antigone and Prometheus.

Designer Nassia Inglessis has created a 17-meter (55 foot) tunnel, the sides of which move as the visitor walks along, reflecting different emotions of those who break the rules, from curiosity to wonder and frustration.

Joy, pride and pain are the complex feelings explored by David Del Valle in his installation about Colombia, a country whose inhabitants have long suffered from preconceptions based on its violent past.

Britain is represented by Forensic Architecture, a collective of artists, architects and journalists who have worked with the Yazidi non-governmental organization Yazda in northern Iraq to help document the destruction by ISIL.

The collective, nominated this year for the prestigious Turner Prize for contemporary art, trains ordinary people to take pictures and create 3D models of Yazidi sites that have been destroyed, both as proof of the crimes committed and a way to help reconstruct them.

At the biennale, Forensic Architecture demonstrate their techniques, including protecting a camera with a plastic bottle and attaching it to a kite to take aerial photos.

"We are not evangelists who think that design can save the world," said Turner.

"But let's hope that in a small way, events like this can help ensure that this attitude of inclusiveness and international creative and culture exchange continues."

A hidden world of facial recognition‍

Don’t judge by appearances. It’s an age-old piece of advice that is being roundly ignored by corporations, governments and law-enforcement agencies around the globe.

British police use facial-recognition technology to scan crowds for suspects. Owners of the latest iPhones can unlock their phones with face ID. Whole Foods and other retailers are testing facial recognition as a way of eliminating check-out tills in stores.

Modern technology means your face is both your identity and a commodity – but as an exhibition going on display in London shows, that technology is far from perfect.

“Face Values,” the US entry at the multinational London Design Biennale, explores how computers’ ability to read faces is changing the world, with implications for privacy and individuality that we still don’t fully understand.

“We are on camera 50 times a day and there are all these software companies that are deriving information from us,” said R. Luke DuBois, one of the exhibition’s designers.

Curated by New York’s Cooper Hewitt Smithsonian Design Museum, “Face Values” includes two interactive pieces that explore the scope and limits of what technology can learn about you from your face.

Artist and computer programmer Zachary Lieberman invites visitors to sit in front of a screen as a computer maps their expressions, compares them to others’ and produces an analysis of the sitter’s emotion.

“It’s a kind of fingerprint of your facial expression,” said Lieberman, who has helped design an eye-tracking system for people with paralysis.

“This project involved a lot of trying to understand, how do you quantify expression?” he said at a preview of the exhibition on Monday. “How do you turn expression into numbers,” in order to compare one expression to another?

The limits of such technology become clearer in the accompanying piece by DuBois, director of the Brooklyn Experimental Media Center at New York University’s engineering school.

Visitors sit in front of a screen and are asked to display a specific emotion. Using technology similar to that deployed by some police forces, the system calculates the individual’s age, gender, race and emotional state. 

The results are both intrusive and sometimes inaccurate. One visitor, attempting to project calmness, registered as afraid. Another, asked to look disgusted, was told she appeared happy.

DuBois said the technology is only as good as the data that goes into it – and the sets of images that companies and organizations use to compare emotions are often inadequate. He wants to increase awareness about this powerful and fast-developing technology.

“In an older era – like 10 years ago – we should have been paying a lot more attention to what kind of data Facebook was taking from us,” he said. “And now it’s a little too late.”

Cooper Hewitt hopes to take its exhibit to the United States after its run in London.

The Design Biennale, which runs Tuesday to Sept. 23 at London’s Somerset House, includes exhibits from 40 countries, cities and territories under the loose theme “Emotional States.” 

They include Latvia’s birch- and pine-scented room, where visitors can write on a green wall of condensation; Australia’s rainbow-colored installation celebrating same-sex marriage; and Hong Kong’s room plastered with scratch-and-sniff wallpaper scented like roast duck, egg tarts, incense and opium.

(Cover: A visitor poses in front of an artwork entitled "Saudi Arabia, Being and Existence" by designer Lulwah Al Homoud, London, UK, September 3, 2018. /VCG Photo)