A Maze Where Every Path Is Correct

“Breaking the law! Breaking the law!”

My 10-year-old son, Valentino, is running with his arms outstretched like airplane wings through Way Through, an art installation composed of 2,100 wires that change color when illuminated by red, green, and blue lights. The wires slip like cooked spaghetti through Valentino’s fingers, forming a flexible wall bending to his will. He looks thrilled; never in a museum has he been allowed to run, touch, or climb.

Way Through is one of many components created for Wired for Wonder, an exhibition at Kidspace Children’s Museum in Pasadena created in collaboration with Getty’s PST ART: Art & Science Collide. Visitors are encouraged to touch, sniff, listen—and even taste, in a couple of instances—their way through a kaleidoscopic maze built inside the barn used to exhibit floats from the Tournament of Roses Parade.

“Normally, a maze is a series of ways where only one way leads to the exit,” wrote Lorenzo Pagliara and Gianmaria Zonfrillo, the Rome-based designers of Way Through, in an email. “We wanted to turn the maze on its head, overturning the concept of a single right way to walk. The labyrinth rules can be broken with initiative and creativity—everyone can open the walls to create their own path to the way out.”

Can an art museum function as an open-ended playground? “Absolutely,” says Kidspace CEO Lisa Clements. She traces the maze’s origins to her tenure at Getty from 2016 to 2020, when she was the assistant director of education, public programs, and interpretive media. In 2017 the Getty Villa Museum was in the midst of a nine-month reinstallation, and Clements wanted to find ways to engage the public with the collection when access was limited.

One engaging result was Ancient Scents: Roman Aromas, a workshop series where guests could sample historically accurate scents from ancient Rome using atomizers—from condiments to laundry detergent to sweaty togas to “victory” (the aroma of a laurel wreath).

“Our challenge was: how do you make another time feel alive?” says Clements. “And since smell is so engaged with memory, we wanted to do something similar to Roman Aromas in the maze.” The idea would expand far beyond the olfactory.

An innovative approach

Valentino sidles up to Wired for Wonder’s “Smell-o-Phone,” a booth decorated in Bauhaus-style graphics. The objective here is for him to call the person on the other side of a video game–like device—me—and when I answer, to blast me with an aroma I must then identify. Valentino presses a button to send a scent called “library.” I pick up my phone and smell the mouthpiece, but it does not evoke shelves of books. “Soap?” I guess. I keep guessing until—after many laughs and clues—I give up. The next scent is “tuna,” which is unpleasant and challenging to guess by nose alone.

When Valentino reveals the smells’ identities—earthworm, sunscreen, and bacon, to name a few—it becomes clear that without other senses to provide context, it’s almost impossible to identify them. But on some occasions, including with the library scent, once I know the answer, all I can smell are shelves of books, tuna, and so on.

Do our senses rarely operate in isolation? This question has long inspired Barry C. Smith, director of the Institute of Philosophy at the University of London’s School of Advanced Study and founding director of the Centre for the Study of the Senses. Smith and his partner, Ophelia Deroy, research the interactions between flavor, taste, and smell. Smith partnered with the Getty Conservation Institute (GCI) in 2015 on the Media in Transition initiative. And in 2023, he and Deroy helped create a mini multisensory maze at the Cheltenham Science Festival in England. Their project encouraged Clements to try one at Kidspace.

Clements pitched the idea to Tom Learner, head of science at the GCI, in 2024. Kidspace and Getty soon partnered; Smith and Deroy were brought in as scientific consultants. Clements wanted to redefine school field trips; to let them be about choice and agency instead of a right or wrong way. “However you learn or perceive things—whatever delights or frightens you, and whatever your response is to other people or situations—all that is good and right,” she says.

Running a hand over another’s experiences

“It looks like he is walking into heaven,” Valentino whispers.

He’s touching a hand-sized glass bottle containing a diorama of a tiny figure climbing a staircase into a cotton ball cloud. The bottle is one of 20 dreamlike vessels that branch out across a metal wall in the artwork reverie by Alison Saar.

Saar became involved when Clements recruited independent curator jill moniz, with whom she had worked on Getty projects such as Unshuttered, a teen photography program. Clements asked moniz to hand-select artists to create sensorial works for the maze that might deepen the visitor experience.

“There are diverse communities here in Los Angeles and Pasadena that perceive and engage with senses differently, and we wanted to include diverse perspectives to expand all worldviews,” moniz says.

She worked closely with Saar on reverie. It was driven by the idea of visitors “running their hands over a young Black girl’s childhood thoughts and dreams, full of fantastical wonder, and imagining that the girl has power, worth, value, and so much possibility,” says moniz.

Another highly tactile installation is Guyanese artist Suchitra Mattai’s The Hollow of Memory, built with recycled saris that were braided with fabric and rope to form a grotto visitors can walk through and sit inside. The saris were worn by women in India, where the garments are handed down in families. “They’ve had many lives, and sometimes you can smell a hint of turmeric, ginger, or jasmine perfume,” says moniz. The scents are part of the subtle, layered hints of Mattai’s and others’ lived experiences. A soundtrack is also audible in certain parts of the grotto for those who listen closely.

Acquiring a taste for surprise

The final room of the maze is a tasting bar. A woman wearing a lab coat hands Valentino and me nose plugs and ramekins of Goldfish crackers and red jelly beans. With our noses clamped shut, the treats are hardly flavorful. Without the sense of sight, I’m not sure we would even know what they are. The woman, called a play facilitator, explains that this sensory dissociation is similar to airplane travel. “At ground level, airplane food is very oversalted and oversweetened, because in the air the pressure is different,” she says. “Up there, it’s the same as if we were plugging our noses. Crazy, right?”

We advance to two watercoolers, one filled with a green liquid, the other, with a red liquid, set on a long table draped in black cloth. The play facilitator offers Valentino a shot of the red liquid and asks him what it tastes like. “Cherry vanilla,” he says. When offered the green liquid, he says it tastes like cucumbers or green apples.

“What if I told you they were exactly the same thing?” the play facilitator says. “Food coloring is the only difference, so your brain is tricking you!” Valentino is shocked; perhaps senses don’t always make sense.

We end up spending about 90 minutes challenging our perceptions at Wired for Wonder, encountering many marvels along the way. At one point we’re inside Earth Seed Frequencies, a room created by artists d. Sabela grimes and Meena Murugesan in tribute to writer Octavia Butler’s Parable series. The space is filled with lush video imagery and a giant green mound that emits sounds and vibrations. A girl climbs onto the sofa-like knoll and stretches her arms to each side for balance. “This is how you surf!” she tells her two sisters, clearly feeling the thrilling surge of an ocean wave beneath her board.