This iconic narrative from the Judeo-Christian tradition is full of olfactory references that are topical today: Continue reading Scent masquerade!
New product scents
The Swiss retailer www.digitec.ch is currently running a thought provoking advertizing campaign. It is basically broadcasting what customers wrote about a product on the retailer’s website. This feedback needn’t be positive. It can be devastating. But it must be interesting. And in fact, the product scent – intended or accidental – occurs frequently as a matter customers care about.
Re-odorizing & its normalization
The campaign aims at the general public. By now air care is normal!
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Scent Culture Monitor
In 2015, we started Scent Culture News to shape and build scent culture as field. Following our mission we have highlighted and connected fragmented themes, ideas, references, and projects that relate to the sense of smell in culture, business and society. More recently, we made a pause and reflected on recurring themes, issues and concepts. As a next step we want to shift our attention from merely disseminating news to a more provocative approach: The launch of our series of smellshots is a first consequence.The heading “Monitor” serves as an umbrella for posts that inform about new development, share observations and commentaries. Thus, the posts from the old Scent Culture New site have also recently been imported to this site.
Feedback
The campaign is a real thing in Switzerland right now.
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Olfactory turn: Smellshots
A snapshot is a “casual photograph made typically by an amateur with a small handheld camera”. It is an “impression or view of something brief or transitory“. And what is a smellshot? Our new category smellshot aims at exploring this notion.
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Breathing in different sensory worlds
“Americans and Arabs live in different sensory worlds much of the time and do not use the same senses even to establish most of the distances maintained during conversations.” – EDWARD HALL Continue reading Breathing in different sensory worlds
Enchanting worlds
It was the social theorist Max Weber who identified progressive disenchantment as an underlying process of modernity. More recently, this creed of modern thinking has increasingly been challenged. Thus, enchantment often evokes the sublime and refers to an aura of authentic presence. Moreover, enchantment has been used as an analytical lense to look at consumer culture as well as new worlds of work. Accordingly, symbolic manipulation is used to enchant customers and employees. Continue reading Enchanting worlds
Smelly wheels: In search of alternatives
Visual representations of smell are one of the core themes of our presence on Instagram: Wheel, circle, and pie have recently appeared as recurring and influential visual metaphors. The fragrance wheel created by Michael Edwards is perhaps the most prominent example these days. But the history of visualizations demonstrates that this is only one example out of many. The visual metaphor of the circle or the wheel has been used to classify urine smells. The colour, smell, and even taste of urine was used to both identify particular illnesses and provide patient prognoses, from Hippocrates to the Victorian era. The practice, called uroscopy or uromancy, was, according to the Doctor’s Review, “once the number-one way to diagnose disease — and predict the future”.
Automobility & Scent Culture: Another Market for Olfactory Nostalgia?
The olfactory dimension of automobility is the core theme of a recent essay by Claus Noppeney published in “Das Magazin” a weekly supplement to several Swiss newspapers. Continue reading Automobility & Scent Culture: Another Market for Olfactory Nostalgia?