Smellscape

Definition

The smellscape is the total olfactory environment of a place — the smelled character of a space treated as a legible, and designable, medium in its own right. The term enters the wiki through two sources joined in Kirsten Brown's chapter: Sissel Tolaas's exhibit Smell, The Beauty of Decay: Smellscape Central Park Autumn 2015 (Cooper Hewitt Smithsonian Design Museum, 2016 Triennial), and Jim Drobnick's essay "The Museum as Smellscape" (The Multisensory Museum, 2014, cited in Brown's notes) — the essay-title already asserting that a museum has a smell-field, whether designed or not.

Tolaas's built version defines the concept's method: the landscape's smellscape is sampled ("smell molecules" taken from Central Park, which lies adjacent to the museum), fixed (infused into the wall paint of an "otherwise unremarkable hallway near the gift shop"), and released on demand ("A gentle application of friction to the painted surface releases the scent, which is then aerated") — the visitor reading a place through its nose alone, "accompanied only by a small map of the park and a tiny room filled with the artist's tools for scent experimentation." The aim: "arouse memories, recreate place, capture seasonality, and stir emotional and intellectual responses." Curator Andrea Lipps frames it as method, not effect: "You see that it is really a scientific process with molecules in a very sterile context… The exhibition itself is trying to challenge visitors to approach design and experiences with objects with much more sensitivity."

The concept's distinctive claim against the museum's visual regime: the smellscape makes the invisible environment the exhibit — "what seem to be bare walls" are the works. It also names the curation problem Andreas Keller states: "smells are more difficult to stably position in space than visual objects" — a smellscape must "preserve the authentic fragrance, effectively transmit it to the visitor, and not interfere with other nearby smells."

A second, urban-stratifying register appears in Jonathan D. Solomon's Hong Kong chapter — the smellscape as the city's actual spatial boundary and class technology, not its museum simulation. The stratification is explicit: "Cooled, dehumidified, perfumed air distinguishes cultural and economic strata that are spatially contiguous and largely indistinct from one another. The full range of human senses are implicated: in Central, a high-end shopping mall branded by Armani is distinguished from an adjacent and connected mall catering to Filipino foreign domestic workers by, among other things, prodigious scents." Via David Howes (citing urban ethnographer Lisa Law), the same register becomes a cultural boundary: "the sounds and scents of the foreign workers, mostly Filipino, establish temporary cultural boundaries between their 'Little Manila' and the financial center" — "This conflict within Hong Kong society over the sensuous (re)construction of space by the migrant workers during their leisure hours testifies to the politics of differing sensory strategies for making sense of the same place, and calls attention to the multicultural tensions embedded in the city's urban fabric." Where Tolaas's smellscape is sampled and framed in a hallway, Solomon's is lived and territorial — smell establishing the boundary "more substantive… than a ground" (Cities Without Ground), the smellscape as the mechanism of both establishment filtering (the perfumed mall) and migrant counter-public ("Little Manila"). See heterosmia, atmospheric-politics, olfaction, boundaries.

Key Thinkers

• Kirsten Brown — the wiki's transmitting source: Tolaas's exhibit described as the smell-register's flagship case, and the smellscape named in the chapter's title-phrase and Drobnick citation.
• Sissel Tolaas — the scent artist whose Smellscape Central Park Autumn 2015 builds the concept: molecular sampling, scent-infused paint, friction-release; not yet paged (see log).
• Jim Drobnick — the theoretical context: "The Museum as Smellscape" (2014) — the museum's smell-field as a curatorial object; his Volatile Architectures (2002/2006) supplies the regimes (anosmia, heterosmia, aromatopia) a smellscape design answers.

Related Concepts

• Olfaction — the parent sense-concept: the smellscape is smell's environmental register — the whole smelled field of a place rather than a single scent effect.
• Heterosmia — the unintended smellscape: Drobnick's commingled smell-field of the postmodern museum; Tolaas's exhibit is the deliberate, curated answer to the same condition.
• Aromatopia — the engineered totality: where the aromatopia saturates all the senses to code the museum as 'other', the smellscape isolates one sense and one place as the entire exhibit.
• Memory — the mechanism: smells "facilitate the recollection of memories, emotional response, and a multidimensional impression of a place, object, or experience" — the smellscape works by involuntary recollection, "arous[ing] memories, recreat[ing] place, capture[ing] seasonality."
• Atmosphere — the phenomenological neighbour: the smellscape is atmosphere's olfactory stratum, made exhibit; scent as the ambience that can be sampled, stored and re-released.
• White Cube — the paradigm the smellscape subverts: the "bare walls" of the gallery that carry an invisible cargo — purity of appearance, engineered scent beneath.

Source Support

Sources in the wiki that discuss this concept:

• Touch, Taste, Smell (Brown 2018) — the concept's wiki source: Tolaas's Smellscape Central Park Autumn 2015 (sampling, infusion, friction-release, memory/place/seasonality aims), Lipps's curatorial framing, Keller's positioning problem, and the Drobnick "Museum as Smellscape" citation.
• Public spheres: Hong Kong's interior urbanism (Solomon 2018) — the urban-stratifying register: the mall-vs-mall scent distinction ("prodigious scents" separating the Armani mall from the domestic workers' mall); Howes/Law's "Little Manila" — "temporary cultural boundaries" established by "the sounds and scents of the foreign workers"; the smellscape as boundary-successor to the ground ("Boundaries determined by sound or smell… can ultimately provide more substantive spatial boundaries than a ground" — Cities Without Ground, per the ORO synopsis); and the smellscape's political double: establishment perfume and migrant counter-scent as rival sensory strategies for the same place. See atmospheric-politics, heterosmia, boundaries.

Open Questions

• Is a smellscape representational (Tolaas's Park-as-sampled — a place's smell standing for the place) or presentational (the scent as the thing itself)? The exhibit is in a hallway next to the actual park it samples — the visitor could smell the "original" down the street; what does the framed version add?
• Can a smellscape be stable? Keller: "smells are more difficult to stably position in space than visual objects" — does every smellscape decay, drift, and cross-contaminate (the MAD fragrances "specially modified to resist sticking on skin or clothes" concede the point), making the smellscape a medium of planned ephemerality?
• What is the relationship between a city's smellscape and a museum's? Drobnick's heterosmia is the museum's accidental smell-field; Tolaas imports a landscape's smell-field into the museum — is the smellscape the unit that lets smell move between urban analysis, curation, and design?
• Solomon's register makes the smellscape territorial ("temporary cultural boundaries between their 'Little Manila' and the financial center") — whose smellscape wins when scents conflict, and is the "temporary" boundary an emancipation (the workers' weekly claim) or a partition (the city's multicultural tension)? Can a smellscape be counter-public — an olfactory commons claimed on a mandated day off — and does the mall's engineered perfume constitute an olfactory enclosure (atmospheric-politics)?