Hennessy's collaboration with Refik Anadol: blending art and science

For the first time after 250 years of history, Hennessy's savoir-faire becomes visible in an artwork thanks to machine intelligence. Mr. Anadol created an artwork representing the Tasting Committee’s sensorial memory, which tracks the experience of tasting the eaux-de-vie.

Back in his California studio, Mr. Anadol and his team filtered the true data — the living memory of two centuries —through sophisticated analytics, transforming the data set into pigments and light. What emerged, the artist says, was a completely harmonious dialogue, an “architecture of memory” that was remarkably consistent across subjects at a specific point in time.

The result is a masterpiece three-dimensional data sculpture: Sense of Heritage, an immersive audio-visual installation, which will be revealed in May, 2021 in Beijing and Hong Kong. Using 3D data mapping, Mr. Anadol interpreted and transcribed the Tasting Committee’s sensorial memory while they were tasting the eaux-de-vie, into the colour, shapes, reliefs and textures that appear on the 2021 Hennessy V.S.O.P Privilège Limited Edition cognac decanter.

What was once an invisible sensory experience has suddenly become tangible and appears in a harmonious and poetic surface design. Data becomes art in a visual metaphor for a blend; like the cognac itself, Sense of Heritage is designed to be appreciated on an individual, sensorial level. To augment this journey, Mr. Anadol designed an “Infinity Room” projecting the Sense of Heritage, the true inner emotion behind Hennessy V.S.O.P Privilège felt by the Tasting Committee. The result is an immersive “architecture of memory” collected through the power of data.
A sharable digital platform will also be unveiled via a QR code on the bottle where people will be able to experience the artwork virtually and have a 360 experience of the Sense of Heritage.