My initial idea was trying to understand why people acted in certain situations and then through talking to multiple people and not having a base for my thesis - I was led down the path of creating a thesis around my own lack of smell. My initial exploration here began in a class where we began to analyze our patterns. Mine being that I attempted to follow the social convention of smelling things around me. Was this to try and fit in or the never ending attempt to see if I could smell this item. With that in mind I changed my focus on trying to better understand the world of smell as an Anosmic.
I wanted to try to bridge the chasm that lies between the olfactory world and the abyss of anosmia.
My process began with trying to understand how smell works. The Emperor of Scent (a recommendation from Mimi Yin) provided me with a theory of olfaction and gave me an insight into the world of perfumery and what fantastic perfume guides were like. That got me interested in the language that people use to describe smells. After that I looked into perfumery and headspace technology (A technology used to capture smells) to see how fragrances were created. I dived into the world of olfactory art, and how different artists had used smells in different ways to try and elicit an emotional response or to highlight the importance of smell. That led me to trying to understand what impact olfaction has on the beauty of something. I read a couple of papers by Marta Tafalla - a professor of Philosophy at the University of Barcelona regarding olfaction and aesthetics. Marta Tafalla being a congenital anosmic provided fantastic insight into how a lack of smell can make the world feel simultaneously less beautiful and less ugly. Then while researching further readings I stumbled apon Lars Lunqvists A world without smells - a book that spoke to living a life with Anosmia.
I gained a lot of insight into a world I was both deeply familiar with but one I had never explored to this depth before. All the while interviewing other anosmic individuals about their experiences.
One of my early prototypes was creating this video installation called please sniff. I wanted other people to get this feeling that I had smells that I was curious about but every time I wished to explore that curiosity I was met with nothing. The experience asked users to “sniff” into a mic that would then glitch out the video and audio of a sequence of clips that played out videos of smells I cared about such as my gym shoes, flowers, a waterfall, laser cutters and more. I liked this experiment because I enjoyed the reaction I got to it. It was one of curiosity and empathy. Another prototype I created was the tech behind Smell Gun. An automated smell machine in the form of a gun that I could point at an item and have it describe to me the smell using Google Lens and GPT-3. After creating this, I was glad I made it but for the fact that I was able to categorize something that I pointed my camera at and not for the description of an algorithm of what a smell could feel like.
After talking about this project with multiple people, one primary point came about which was this felt like a pitch for a set of people that wasn’t me. My thesis wasn’t personal enough. I focused a lot of my energy into looking into the descriptions of smells but I realized I don’t care about it! I care more about the inclusion aspect of it. How can I describe what the world is like for someone with anosmia. This is what I aim to do.
My plan for the spring semester will be to explore these 3 aims in depth. It is rudimentary at the moment but I think that this realization that it wasn’t personal enough is a big breakthrough and I’m glad I get to explore this in a much truer sense to myself.
January:
February:
March: