Wednesday, February 04, 2004
You Stink
Scent as commodity – if it could be transmitted in binary code would it be more desirable and pervasive than music or video? Mutated olfactory faculty – Perfume by Patrick Suskind. In Huxley’s Brave New World scent is piped into people’s rooms – one can literally turn on a tap and have patchouli or rose-oil assail one’s nose. Scent ‘taps’ (excuse the pun) into our primordial memory centres and has a stronger and more direct emotional impact on us than almost any other sense. Also like music you can’t just ‘not touch’ or ‘look away’ from a scent – if you’re exposed to it you have to experience it in some way. Is there an analogous ‘listen’ >> ‘hear’ binary with scent as there is with music? In that you can hear something without consciously listening? With scent we only have the word ‘smell’ – does that mean our experience of ‘scent’ is limited to the one-dimensional? If language creates consciousness then this must necessarily be the case. How many ways can you experience something if you can only express the experience one way?
NJS
2/04/2004 06:41:00 pm
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