serendipityoucity

There is this great psychogeography gathering happening in NYC - Conflux that i will not be able to go to!  There is even a smelling committee meeting that will capture the whiffs of Brooklyn’s smellscapes led by Caitlin Berrigan and Michael McBean both new media artists.

I had some fun with olfaction at work and here is a small bit from a paper in Canada’s Cartographic Academic Journal - Cartographica.  In fact i think it was the most fun i have ever had writing!

Lauriault, T. P., & Lindgaard, L. (2006). Scented Cybercartography: Exploring Possibilities. Special Issue of Cartographica on Cybercartography, 41(1), 73-91.

The following are extracts from the paper: 

Most people are familiar with a smell that has transported them through space and time to a trip to the sea or a childhood home.  Rodaway (1994:62) in Sensuous Geographies suggests that an “olfactory geography would be interested in the role of smell in geographical experience, such as organization of space, spatial relationships, locatedness, orientation in space, and characterization or senses of place (Rodaway 1994:62).  In western episteme, and indeed in the discipline of cartography, there is a strong visual and textual bias. Traditionally, a map enables the user to view the cartographer’s spatial abstraction. Cybercartography, a new approach to cartography, aims to explore other bodily ways of knowing and create a holistic and experiential cartography that immerses users in a rich sensory information world that includes olfaction. In the material world scents reveal the unique character of a place, and may provide a more meaningful experience of an environment (Pow 2000).  Since humans mediate and organize territory and space with their noses (Press and Minta 2000), it follows that cartography and virtual environment (VE) can be qualitatively enriched with the addition of scent. Further, scent may add a novel dimension to primarily visual representations of space by evoking the memory or emotions associated to a particular place rather than simply its spatial structuration (Rodaway 1994; Pow 2000).  Olfaction enables us to gain new knowledge about human interaction with the environment (Classen 1993, 1998, 1999; Howes 2005; Press and Minta 2000; Porteous 1985; Rodaway 1994) and a scented cartography may provide greater access to that dimension.  Furthermore, a fuller use of the body’s sensory capacities may provide valuable ways to navigate, understand, and interact more effectively and in a more engaging manner with the vast amounts of spatial information currently available.   Finally, scent may reveal previously hidden elements of space and place, facilitate the questioning of visual assumptions or messages and its ambient qualities can be used to immerse, persuade, mislead or create a more pleasurable cartographic experience.

Geographers are beginning to collect scents data and cartographers are mapping scent as an attribute, but are not yet scenting their maps.  Artists are incorporating the immersive properties of smell into their work but have not yet developed what we might call a “scent aesthetic” and marketers seduce us to purchase via our noses.  …..

Our Elusive sense of smell 

We navigate the world primarily using sight, sound, and touch while the roles of our olfactory and gustatory senses are relatively unknown.  Our sense of smell in particular has been relegated to the bottom of the sensory list (Watson 1999, Classen 1998; Press and Minta 2000).  Scent does not lend itself to empirical trust; it is primitive, linked in its raw, unfiltered form to our emotions (Press and Minta 2000). Classen, in The Color of Angels, discusses the sensory symbolism of western culture from the 14^th century onward, and argues that sexism, racism, classicism, and empiricism have played an important role in placing smell at the bottom of the sensory hierarchy.  The sensuous times of pre-modernity (17th and 18th centuries), she suggests, were superseded by a scientific and mechanical world view; the universe became figure, magnitude and motion.  The symbolism of sensory qualities was thought to lack reality and the world people lived in, rich in colour, fragrance, texture and sound, became cold, colourless, silent and dead (Classen 1998) -  in other words deodorized.  With modernity:

the sense of smell is usually associated with the instincts and emotions rather than with reason or spirituality.  With few exceptions, smell and smells have been discredited and removed from the arena of intellectual discourse, and, in many cases, from cultural life in general (Classen 1998:36).

Watson notes that the world is rich in scent, yet “there is no semantic tradition, no critical study of the origin and function or words used to describe smells in any country, and no learning process in any culture assigned specifically to the sense of smell” (1999:4).  Press and Minta (2000) suggest that “olfactory cognition can proceed without instantaneous linguistic representation” and that “olfaction is a fundamentally different, non-symbolic, way of knowing” thus “the diversity of odours holds vocabulary at bay’ (Press and Minta 2000:182).  Some cultures such as the Ongee in the Andaman Islands, Sereer N’Dut in Senegal, Dassenth of Ethiopia, the Tukano in the Columbian Amazon, and South Tunisians are culturally and socially organized around their sense of smell, each with their own semiotic olfactory way of communicating. 

Howes (1991) advises social scientists to develop bodily ways of knowing to understand sensory forms of communication. This is particularly important since odours play an important role in rituals, social interaction and in biological communication conveying information such as gender, disease, and family association (Doty 1981). It seems that western visuocentric and verbocentric biases do not provide the necessary framework to understand and express olfactory and gustatory dimensions.  Brady (2005) argues that we need to recognize the smell events in our lives, immerse ourselves in smellscapes and try to develop and expand our scent vocabularies.  

Olfaction is highly specialized; it influences emotions, behaviour, perception of other people, and people’s mood (Chen 1998; Vroon, van Amerongen and de Vries 1994; Porteous 1985, Howes 1991 and Ackerman 1990).  Smells are also politically charged and can lead to social conflict and displacement. A classic example was the smell of the fishing industry (e.g. Chinese squid dryers, sardine canners and unions) combined with competing land-use demands (e.g. the Hotel Del Monte, tourism and real estate agents) along the Monterey Peninsula in California (Chiang 2004).  The olfactory system detects danger, guides eating, and is also deeply connected to memory (Maylor, Carter and Hallett 2002; Vroon and others 1994 and Engen 1982). 

Scents are episodic; they have a point source, dissipate in space and are associative; few know how to systematically use this sense, yet scents remain deeply meaningful.  Scents are subliminally immersive; we readily become part of the invisible scent of a landscape.  When we inhale a scent its chemical composition becomes part of us, it passes through our bodies and returns changed into the environment and for some this process is considered as the “breath of God” purifying the body (Thus, Horkheimer and Adorno in Classen 1998; Ackerman 1990 and Howes 1991).  It provides a direct means to sample the environment just like we sample the chemical compositions of its objects (Press and Minta 2000).  We experience scents, absorb them without reasoning. This chemical aspect of scent makes olfaction a direct sensuous geography; it is immediate, local and can emotionally bond subjects and researchers with their environment (Rodaway 1994).  Its absorbing; personal qualities may have hampered its scientific enquiry:

unlike the purely subjective senses of smell and taste, those of sight, touch and hearing lend ‘an empirical thrust’ to the perceptions of external objects. In the act of seeing, one remains oneself; in the act of smelling, one dissolves. The eye looks at something out there and the mind’s attention is out there. The perception of the nose seems invasive to the mind because there is an immediacy of the self with the subjective emotion elicited by odor (Press and Minta 2000:173).

Empirical research investigating the application of multisensory and multimodal data representations in cartography is relatively new (Griffin 2001).  Results are often inconclusive and conflicting largely because we do not yet understand how best to mix different display modalities and technologies.  The report IT Roadmap to a Geospatial Future acknowledges the need for fundamental research into information conceptualization, perception, representation, and for complex multisensory multimodal input/output data displays (NRC 2003). Cartographers will first need to understand how the sense of smell works before designing smell into their maps.

Our knowledge of smell perception, odour evaluation, as well as our ability to discriminate scents has not been widely explored. Likewise, the potential physical and emotional impact of smell on preferences and performance is not well understood.  To date there are few non-associative taxonomies.  Theories seeking to explain how we detect smell conflict with one another (e.g. Shape versus Vibration theory)….

thanks for sending the links to this event michael!