Imagine: You’re standing in a gallery. In your hand is a perfumed strip of paper; over your ears, a pair of headphones. As you breathe in the scent and the music swells, you watch a dance performance unfold on video, while peeking at a painting and a sculpture on the periphery. Sound heady? It is, especially when you know that each creation is a link in the same artistic chain reaction. The catalyst for it all: local musician Sally Taylor, the progeny of James Taylor and Carly Simon and the creator of Consenses, a multidisciplinary art project two years in the making.

Taylor was originally inspired by the Indian fable about six blind men encountering an elephant; each feels a different part of the animal—one grasping the ropy tail, another touching a leg as thick as a tree trunk—and draws conclusions based on his limited experience, the moral being that perception is never right or wrong. But the project might be best described as an artistic game of telephone. In Consenses, an artist is given a work from another genre—without being told any context about it—and asked to interpret it in a new piece. He or she then passes the resulting work (but not the original that inspired it) to a choreographer, musician or some other creator from a different field, who offers a new interpretation, and so on until (ideally) all of the senses are engaged. “It’s really about art as a journey rather than a destination,” says Taylor, who exhibited eight of the completed “chains” on Martha’s Vineyard this summer and will showcase them at 212 Elm St. in Somerville from Sept. 26 to Oct. 7 and at Club Oberon in Cambridge from Sept. 29 to Oct. 1.

To display the chains, Taylor enlisted the aid of set designers who were privy to all the pieces and aimed to create a unified viewing experience. The result is nothing short of astonishing. Chain #7, for instance, begins with an image by acclaimed Vineyard photographer Alison Shaw, which then spawned a song by musician Isaac Taylor, who gave a recording to Canadian dancer Alexandre Lane and Dutch-born Canadian painter Hendrik “Henk” Gringhuis, whose choreography and painting inspired an anonymous perfumer’s scent and finally a sculpture by North Carolina artist Thomas Sayre. In viewing a completed chain, what leaps out is not what’s lost in translation, but the commonalities, the way the strong sense of geometry in Shaw’s original photo persists through song, dance, scent, painting and sculpture.

So far, the project has tapped more than 140 artists from 23 countries, ranging from Taylor’s astonishingly talented extended family and big names like Wes Craven to esoteric artists working in far-flung corners of the earth. The project comprises 22 chains in total, but the potential for perpetuation is obvious, and the explosion of creativity is inspirational, whether you’re an artist, an aesthete or just someone who revels in the senses.