Posts tagged smell

9 October 2008

Perhaps my title's a bit hyperbolic, but writing today's other smell-related post got me fondly recalling my favorite sentence (and there was good competition) from Nicholson Baker's 1997 essay collection, The Size of Thoughts, which is—with a few diversions—a string of celebrations of commonplace cultural objects, often starting at the point before the starting point: the smell of a fresh book, the friendly rattle of a model airplane kit still in the box.

re: books, cultivation and creation, slang, smell

Nate

from "Leading with the Grumper," by Nicholson Baker, The New York Review of Books, 11 August 1994, collected in The Size of Thoughts: Essays and Other Lumber :: via New Scientist

This may be the funniest and best-smelling work of profound lexicographical slang-scholarship ever published. Some may respect the hint of Elmer’s glue in recent printings of Partridge’s Dictionary of Slang and Unconventional English (8th ed.), or the faint traces of burlap and cocoa-bean that linger deep in The Oxford Dictionary of Modern Slang, or even the fume of indoor swimming-pool that clings to the paper-bound decolletage of Slang!: The Topic-By-Topic Dictionary of Contemporary American Lingoes. But a single deep draught of J. E. Lighter’s magnificent Historical Dictionary of American Slang (volume I, A-G) is a higher order of experience: it smells like a high-ceilinged bare room freshly painted white - clean and sunlit, full of reverberative promise and proud of its mitered corners, although with a mildly intoxicating or hyperventilational ‘finish’…

9 October 2008

It's a little hard to talk about "conceptual scent art" or "scratch-and-sniff technology" without feeling a little silly—maybe there's a set of French words that make it all sound more important. But I can't help but feel that aroma is creatively underutilized. Not that there isn't a scent aspect to all sorts of cultural products and endeavors, but that we don't talk about it much, and often don't really notice smells (at least in non-food-related endeavors) unless something's amiss.

re: art, books, horizons of the possible, smell

Nate

a Cool Hunting post by Doug Black, 5 September 2008

Robert Blackson is a trailblazer in the nascent field of conceptual scent art. He recently curated an exhibition at the Reg Vardy Gallery in Sunderland, England, that took viewers through fourteen significant points in time and space using only the olfactory sense.

The concept, according to Blackson, came from reading Eric Schlosser’s “Fast Food Nation.” The book mentions how food corporations can use artificial chemicals to engineer smells and tastes that replicate virtually any substance. With this in mind, Blackson tasked perfumers, chemists, botanists and even a NASA scientist to engineer smells that most humans might never experience. Scents created include everything from long extinct plants to the fragrance immediately following an atomic bomb explosion. They even recreated the smell of the surface of the Sun, which scientists approximated by using the scents of seven earth metals heated to their melting point.

“If There Ever Was” is the companion book to the art exhibit. It features paper inserts that correspond to the exhibit smells, all manifested through scratch-and-sniff technology. That way, you can smell the putrid odor of Russian gym socks on the Mir space station without having to leave the comfort of your home. “If There Ever Was” costs $25 in the Cornerhouse store.

via Fed By Birds