“Perfumes are the soft-focus lense on our rough daily existence. They are the invisible, user-friendly interface in daily human interaction. They are sheer present – yet we have unearthed their primordial past. They seem pure phenomenon – yet they contain memory, erratic and unpredictable. And although they seem to lend themselves so...
Olfactory silence
“In their loss, smells have become a literary topic of our time, as much as they are a topic of the world of science and technology and of business.” – HANS RINDISBACHER
Düfte plaudern lassen: Rückblick auf Duft – & Literaturfestival in Solothurn
Wenn Düfte erzählen hiess es vom 26. Mai bis zum 2. Juni 2019 in Solothurn. Im Rahmen des Schweizerischen Nationalfonds Agora Projekts Smelling more, smelling differently an der Berner Fachhochschule gab es eine Eventreihe mit mehreren hundert Besuchern, die als innovatives Duft- und Literaturfestival in die Annalen geht: interaktiv, partizipativ & performativ....
Michel Serres: the philosopher of the senses R.I.P.
Michel Serres, the French philosopher, died yesterday.
Seasonal Greetings!
“B. O.” is the indispensable Other of the perfume and fragrance industry, despised and feared at the same time; to be eradicated, yet its raison d’etre.” – HANS RINDISBACHER
Ignorant smelling
“We thought it necessary to begin with the sense of smell, because of all the senses it is the one which appears to contribute least to the knowledge of the human mind.” – Etienne Bonnot de CONDILLAC
Olfactory language in British fiction
Scent has so far remained largely sidelined into the context of the eighteenth-century novel. Reading Smell by Emily Friedman and published in 2016 provides models for how to incorporate olfactory knowledge into new readings of the literary form central to our understanding of the eighteenth century and modernity in general: the...
Scent Verse: Muse Booze
Scent Verse is a inspiring poetry project on Basenotes curated by writer Eddie Bulliqi.
Disorder of things
“The specific problem with the olfactory in this respect is that its linguistic structure of reference always throws us back into the disorder of things.” – HANS RINDISBACHER
“The Smell of Loss” – NY Times
The English author and critic Julie Myerson explores in her fictional piece the smell of a loss. It is amazing how many different associations and aspects are covered in this short piece in the New York Times.
Umberto Eco R.I.P.:Turn scent into a stimulus for critical reflection!
Umberto Eco, the Italian cultural theorist and novelist who became the author of best-selling novels, notably the blockbuster medieval mystery “The Name of the Rose,” died last week in Milan. Eco was a contributor to our thinking on scent culture.
Volatile!: A Poetry and Scent Exhibition
What if every poem had its own fragrance, beyond the literal smell of the materiality of the page? What if one could smell a poet’s imaginative, conceptual, intellectual world, the text unfurling into an aroma? In Volatile!, curator and design historian Debra Riley Parr presents a number of objects and...
100 Contemporary Poems about Perfume
The Book of Scented Things collects poems reflecting the experience of selected vials of perfume.
Associative potential
“Smell is, with its storing and retrieving characteristics, an associative and expansive rather than an distributive and limiting sensory mode. The lack of terminological paradigms as they exist for colors necessitates linguistic detour through the metaphoric, that is a breach of reference level in the text each time we attempt...
ODE: Scent inspired stories!
Artistic research is an increasingly popular term to conceptualize research activities in the world of art & design universities. The concept highlights the epistemic aspects of artistic practices. Accordingly, certain artistic practices are driven by questions and aim at generating knowledge. Iconic cases from art & design history (e.g. Bauhaus)...
Back to Top