The installation One Billion, Four Hundred Ninety-Five Million, Eight Hundred Fifty-Two Thousand, Twenty-Four (1,495,852,024) (Steffany Martz Gallery, 1998) served as an original work in itself and as an introduction to World Sensorium. The number represents the total population, in the year 2000, of China, Pakistan, Algeria, Kenya, Saudi Arabia, Tunisia, Paraguay, Macau, and Djibouti, the countries that identified jasmine as their most culturally significant scent. Just as 1,495,852,024 represents 24.5862 percent of the world’s population in the year 2000, jasmine makes up 24.5862 percent of the formula of the world scent. In the installation, the composition of different species of jasmine was disseminated into the gallery. The jasmine composition was also formulated on the population percentages of the countries.

An installation view of Gayil Nalls’s 1,495,852,024 at the Steffany Martz Gallery, New York. (Gayil Nalls © 1998–2008)

The installation also included large-scale photographic prints on canvas taken by photojournalists. This type of large-visual-field human portraiture showed different views of massing events within the countries represented by the jasmine scent during the year 1998. The primary aesthetic concern of each photo was the overall composition of the massing portraits, i.e., the patterning created by the individual bodies. These images were an exploration of the theory of the Aesthetics of Mass Anatomy: Are there compositional patterns that the mind imprints and recalls, allowing patterns to be reconstructed? The massing portraits were juxtaposed alongside close-up photographic images on canvas of jasmine shrubs. These images were taken in an attempt to re-create the compositional patterns in the massing photojournalistic images. The intent was to try and recall the photojournalistic images of massing events and re-create the patterning while photographing the jasmine to see if there were matching patterns that could be identified from memory. The images were exhibited with the massing portraits on the left, the jasmine flower images on the right, and a bottle of a jasmine essential oil blend, engraved with the name of the country in which the massing portrait was taken and the number of people in that country.