All posts by Scent Culture Institute: Smelling in Culture, Business & Society

Scent Culture Institute is a hub for projects on smelling in culture, business & society based in Switzerland: Thought leadership, cultural production, multi-sensory innovation; general management development; talks, workshops & consulting. SCI ist eine Platform für Projekte zum Geruchsinn, Riechen, Düften in Kultur, Wirtschaft, Unternehmen und Gesellschaft in der Schweiz (Zürich & Bern): Forschung, Entwicklung, Vorträge, Workshops, Beratung, kulturelle Produktion.
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Where to Find Out What’s Inside Anything | WIRED

YOU’RE SURROUNDED BY molecules. Small molecules—your ethanols, your methanes, your H2Os. But also big ones—the polymers, long chains of carbons and nitrogens and oxygens all strung together in impossibly complex combinations and orientations. If you’re a chemist, you see those molecules in everything, whether or not you actually see them: in the smell of pine trees and the feel of conditioner on your hair and the whiff of leather in a new car.

If you’re a non-chemist, you can still see those molecules. But not in some Beautiful Mind-like overlay of the world’s atoms and bonds—more like in difficult-to-pronounce, multisyllabic words on nutrition facts labels and ingredients lists that may or may not give you PTSD from that one semester of organic chemistry. If you’ve ever wondered just what the hell stearoxytrimethylsilane is and what exactly it’s doing in your face wash, these sources are here to help.

http://www.wired.com/2015/09/find-whats-inside-anything/

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SMELL @ V2_, Institute for the Unstable Media

V2_ presents, produces, archives and publishes research at the interface of art, technology and society. Founded in 1981, V2_ offers a platform for artists, designers, scientists, researchers, theorists, and developers of software and hardware from various disciplines to discuss their work and share their findings. In V2_’s view, art and design play an essential role in the social embedding of technological developments. V2_ creates a context in which issues regarding the social impact of technology are explored through critical dialogue, artistic reflection and practice-oriented research.

SMELL @ V2_, Institute for the Unstable Media

SCI academic output, SCI scent culture education, SCI talks & presentations

Expanding the sensorium: Smell in Art & Design Education

The Lucerne School of Art and Design is the oldest college of art and design in German-speaking Switzerland. In fact, it is celebrating the 140th anniversary of its foundation throughout this academic year. Thus, the school reflects on the history and prospects of art and design education and organizes a sequence of keynote lectures titled: €Craftsmen and Visionaries: Art and Design Education between Social Responsibility and Freedom. Here is the program: Ringvorlesung Symposium 2015. In this context, Claus Noppeney has been invited to explore olfaction as an innovative field in art and design (education). Being strongly rooted in craftsmanship, traditional perfumery takes a cultural turn. Innovative products and services (see our Scent Culture News) show how the sense of smell steadily becomes a design parameter.  Moreover, the olfactory dimension is increasingly part of contemporary artistic practices.

Continue reading Expanding the sensorium: Smell in Art & Design Education →

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The Poetics of Smell as a Mode of Knowledge

“The act of smelling something, anything, is remarkably like the act of thinking itself. Immediately, at the very moment of perception, you can feel the mind going to work, sending the odor around from place to place, setting off complex repertoires throughout the brain, polling one center after another for signs of recognition, old memories, connections. This is as it should be, I suppose, since the cells that do the smelling are themselves proper brain cells, the only neurons whose axones carry information picked up at first hand in the outside world…”

https://www.brainpickings.org/2015/10/28/lewis-thomas-on-smell-long-line-of-cells/

This is an extract from a larger essay on the sense of smell smell. The original source: Thomas, L. (1983). On Smell. In L. Thomas, Late Night Thoughts on Listening to Mahler’s Ninth Symphony (S. 40–44). New York: Viking Press.
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The Poetics of Smell as a Mode of Knowledge | Brain Pickings

“The act of smelling something, anything, is remarkably like the act of thinking itself. Immediately, at the very moment of perception, you can feel the mind going to work, sending the odor around from place to place, setting off complex repertoires throughout the brain, polling one center after another for signs of recognition, old memories, connections. This is as it should be, I suppose, since the cells that do the smelling are themselves proper brain cells, the only neurons whose axones carry information picked up at first hand in the outside world…”

https://www.brainpickings.org/2015/10/28/lewis-thomas-on-smell-long-line-of-cells/

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Why Do Most Languages Have So Few Words for Smells? – The Atlantic

And why do these two hunter-gatherer groups have so many? Interesting questions and article from The Atlantic, on the research of Asifa Majid from Radboud University in the Netherlands on the Jahai people of Malaysia and the Maniq of Thailand. (Majid’s work was featured earlier this year in a piece by The Economist.) But perhaps another way to look at it is via this excellent post from Dr. Avery Gilbert on The Alleged Limitations of Olfactory Language.

http://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2015/11/the-vocabulary-of-smell/414618/

DICTUM

Perfumer

“At the beginning was actually not the Verb, but the Scent: for chemical detection was the communication tool used by the first bacteria appearing on earth, for food and reproduction.” –

CHRISTOPHE LAUDAMIEL, CHRISTOPH HORNETZ, BRAJA MOOKHERJEE & SUBHA PATEL Continue reading Perfumer →

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L’Artisan Parfumeur X Arnaud Larher Create Ephemeral Pastry L’Exquis – The Scented Salamander

 

L’Artisan Parfumeur allied themselves with Meilleur Ouvrier de France pastry chef Arnaud Larher to create L’Exquis inspired by their new perfume Noir Exquis. Continue reading L’Artisan Parfumeur X Arnaud Larher Create Ephemeral Pastry L’Exquis – The Scented Salamander →