Brian Eno altered the course of both pop and experimental music. He is now 70 years old. After leaving […]
Category Archive: Scent Culture Comment & Review
Scent Culture Institute takes a stand & shares views and observations, comments and reviews
Germany will shut down its remaining black coal mines by the end of this year. This plan seals […]
A car is a means of transportation. This is obvious. What is less obvious however is that the […]
“Smell is in the nose of the smeller, but also in the culture of the smeller.” – ANTONY SYNNOTT
The entombment of Christ is one of several standard representations of Jesus’s suffering and death at the hands […]
The ongoing normalization of ambient scent creates a growing need for diffusers. In most cases diffusers convey some distinct atmosphere: it might be somehow esoteric or rather technical. But there are very few products we have seen so far that seem to resonate with current design culture.
The University of Applied Sciences & Arts Hildesheim is looking for a new professor for “light & space” for its department of lighting design. Reflecting on the olfactory turn we slightly rewrote the official job opening:
We have been looking at cars as “olfactory artifact” for quite a while. In fact, the automobile sector is part of a larger interest in the aesthetic and experience economy.
There is a long lasting history of dealing with scent in pop music. More recently, Jeans for Jesus, a widely known player in the local pop music scene in Switzerland, made an interesting move:
The genesis of private property has been a recurring theme in political philosophy since ancient times. In his essays on the five senses the French philosopher Michel Serres proposes a “smelly theory of private property”:
In addition to light, sound, color and other design dimensions scent is increasingly used to influence human emotions and behavior. Aromatherapy is the discipline that has developed this expertise and knowledge of centuries. Scent Marketing is currently an obvious case. But there are also non-commercial contexts as this story from Eindhoven reports.
Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum will present “The Senses: Design Beyond Vision” . In the 1980s the Swiss design thinker Lucius Burckhardt coined: “Design is invisible“.
There are different ways how to address smell in advertizing. Campaigns in perfumery are an obvious case. Moreover, we recently discussed how even negative feedback on the olfactory quality of a product is used in advertizing. The example of today stands out in a different way.
In today’s art world the sensorium is focused on the visual. A closer look however reveals that the sense of smell should no longer be neglected. Here is an ethnographic story from hanging out with art collectors at a recent edition of Art Basel that might be more telling and revealing than any systematic survey.