Smelltopia

External stimuli captured by our senses and processed through neurochemical pathways are essential in defining the world around us. Cities produce an endless array of experiences that our bodies and brains sort through constantly to formulate our interpretation of them. A number of artists, landscape architects and others involved in environmental awareness and placemaking are pushing back against the dominance of the image as the primary mode of representation of place. They recognise the importance of conveying invisible forms of connection and experience across time and space and are proposing that a more robust engagement of the non-visual senses, including olfactory, auditory, gustatory, tactile and kinesthetic be used for a richer interpretation and understanding of our cities.

Of all the senses, smell is most closely associated with memory. The olfactory input in respiration is constant; it can’t be turned off in the same way that eyes can be shut. What is perceived as scent is derived from subtle distinctions in chemical molecules and pheromones floating in the air. Through respiration, scent follows the nose’s receptors on a neural route to the limbic system, which is considered the most ancient part of the brain, as it was present in our mammalian ancestors. Smell is a core contributor to memory, emotion and learning. Certain smells can unexpectedly trigger memories long obscured by the fog of time. They connect us immediately and enduringly to our memories.

These sensory experiences can create a sense of connection to the unexperienced historic character of a place. They can be strong enough that one could seem to ‘remember’ it without having ever been there. The following two interactive artworks utilise this phenomenological manoeuvering to develop ‘Smelltopias’, places imagined and embodied through the nose and olfaction. They are powerful examples of how smell can be used to interpret and communicate neglected issues associated with urban place-ness across time.

Storytelling and the Invisible Physicality of Perfume

Alameda Heart Notes, by SALT Landscape Architects and the Institute for Art and Olfaction, both located in Los Angeles’s Chinatown, was an interactive work that developed a series of custom ‘smellscapes’ to reveal vital histories of ROW DTLA, an adaptive re-use, mixed-use district at the historic Los Angeles Terminal Market. Opened in 1917, the Terminal Market was the final stop for produce and other goods along the Southern Pacific Railroad’s Alameda Corridor in downtown Los Angeles. While ROW DTLA’s new shops and pop-up events are predominantly trendy and upscale, the re-fashioned site still houses the busy Seventh Street Produce Market, an adjacent, wholesale thoroughfare containing over 85 vendors catering to the commercial food industry in Los Angeles.

Alameda Heart Notes is not an intellectual history lesson, bound by dates of events or the names of the rich and powerful. Rather, it is a series of resonant love songs to a diversity of moments and experiences of a particular place through time.
 

Smell can be used to interpret and communicate neglected issues associated with urban place-ness across time

When Allen Compton of SALT was asked to participate in LA Design Week at ROW DTLA, he and his team were hoping to come up with a new way to allow the site to emerge. He recounted: “The project started with a question, how can ‘place-ness’ be explored beyond researching and re-packaging historic words and images? The facts of how the site had been used over the decades were well known. We could see photos of them, read about them, but how could we more deeply ‘feel’ them to intuitively recall and acknowledge what this place had been?”

The team joined forces with Saskia Wilson-Brown, Founder and Executive Director of The Institute for Art and Olfaction, a non-profit devoted to advancing public, artistic and creative experimental engagement with scent. Wilson-Brown was intrigued with the concept of communicating an evolving urban sense of place by creating historic touch point fragrances: “There have been projects relating scent to place, most notably the ones implemented by Kate McLean (Smell walks in cities around the world). The Alameda Heart Notes project was unique in that there was a more overt narrative of change to draw from, as it delved into how space changes through time. Likewise, the research was thorough, which provided for rich and complex odour profiles.”

Over a series of five workshops at the Institute, the team aimed to uncover and create essences for five moments in historic eras that expressed distinct developmental and land-use milestones to tell the site’s ‘essential’ story. Compton recounted, “The scents didn’t have to be pleasant; they needed only to signify experience and not be overwhelming or confusing. Most important was that each scent had to express memorable meaning.”

The workshops included individuals who had a personal connection to each one of the time periods. These included a tribal biologist with the Gabrileño Band of Mission Indians of the Kizh nation, a vintner and Los Angeles city archivist, a map librarian, a historian specialising in California produce, the great-grandson of the man who brought the train to downtown Los Angeles and a former American Apparel factory worker.

After researching the chronology of the site over time, the team chose five eras to represent as historic smellscapes: Pre-1781: The Gabrieleño; 1833: Spanish Missions; 1876: Citrus Groves and the Emergence of the Railroad; 1917: The Terminal Market; and 2000: Industrial Re-use: American Apparel. Each smellscape relays distinctive spatial and atmospheric features intended to recollect temporal place-ness. While the framework for the project follows a traditional chronological order, the scents themselves are timeless and simultaneous; they all occupy the same space. It is only the element of time that has transformed this space into a series of vastly different places. These perfumed glimpses into the past are fluid, transmuting and evolving as the scents evaporate and fade.

In perfumery, notes are the musical metaphoric nomenclature for the three classes of scents that comprise a fragrance. Notes reveal themselves after initial application and through evaporation over time. The top or head notes come on first, the middle or heart notes are the main body of a fragrance and the final base notes linger. Very much like memories, notes not only work in concert to create something greater than their respective parts, but they can also work against each other, as one note can often alter or obscure the perception of the next over time.

The earliest smellscape in Alameda Heart Notes, titled Pre-1781, recalls the Gabrieleño’s deep reverence for nature — its seasons, cycles and the sacred river. The scent is defined by the single, pure note of the California Sagebrush (Artemisia californica), the pungent plant colloquially referred to as ‘Cowboy Cologne’. It connotes an expansive, undeveloped arid landscape, rich with the volatile oils of the coastal sage scrub plant. The 1833 smellscape evokes a consecrated vineyard, equal parts pungent fermentation, dark oak casks and sanguine leather-clad bibles. It embodies the half-century during which the Missionaries transformed the Los Angeles Basin into farmland with wild grape vines to produce Sacramental wine. These vineyards gave way to citriculture in 1876, and the orange became the romantic symbol of California, which was marketed as ‘the land of health and wealth.’ The ensuing spike in land speculation and real estate boom was directly connected to the development of the Southern Pacific Railroad. The fragrance is redolent of both land and industry, a honey blossom dream, sunbaked Los Angeles at dusk. The scent that marks the era of 1917 acknowledges the bustling life of the produce warehouse. It communicates an almost oppressive organic presence, abundant rows of tomatoes arranged in stacked wood crates and fallen peach skins moldering in sticky union with sawdust and pavement.

The smellscapes conclude with 2000, a watershed year in America. The change in millennia ushered in a generation born into anxiety over domestic and foreign terrorism, climate change and the rapid technological evolution leading to an increasingly digitally driven culture. During this era, the American Apparel Factory occupied the historic L.A. Terminal Market. The head note for the scent is a chaste, strident aroma of laundry detergent that is familiar and entirely synthetic. The heart and base notes underpin an alternate story of oiled factory steel and body odor, of the pre-millennial city’s standard human-machine interface.

During a block party event at ROW DTLA in June 2019, five team envoys sprayed the scents on thick white cardstock and passed them out. The cards were printed with the scent year and title, and the participants shared with the public a bit of pertinent information about the scents’ perfume notes as well as the era’s history. In the process of encountering each of these scents, something like a memory trace was created. These smelltopias are invisible, yet somehow more immediate and tangible than words and historic photographs. They offer passages into what has been and reminders of lost connections to land, nature, cycles, seasons, to the people and things for which we have no words and from which we are increasingly removed.

The Nose, Identity and Environmental Well-Being

Smog Orchestra, by Nova Jiang, with music composed by Celia Hollander, is a performance work inspired by Los Angeles’s air quality data. During 2018, Jiang participated as artist in residence at the Los Angeles Clean Tech Incubator (LACI), a non-profit, public-private partnership developed to drive the city’s goal of growing its innovative green energy sector. At LACI, the artist interacted with climate scientists involved with the green energy industry about L.A.’s multi-pronged effort over the past decades to improve air quality. She realised that, “since smog reduction has been so successful in Los Angeles, it’s not something people think about a lot anymore. Giving some kind of visible or audible form to it is an interesting and natural challenge for art.” In addition, the work addresses the crucial environmental equity discrepancies often found in cities: “It’s well documented that poorer neighbourhoods have worse air pollution, such as neighbourhoods near freeways. I hope Smog Orchestra highlights what we have in common, the fact that we all need to breathe air.”

Jiang created prototypes of rounded, nose-shaped ocarinas, an ancient flute-like instrument that is often also worn as a pendant. They were 3D printed using the photogrammetry technique, based on the noses of the artist’s friends. The artist notes that blowing into these instruments feels intimate. The form also is very similar to a Chinese ceramic instrument called a Xun, which Jiang received as a gift from her father in China. For her, the ocarinas themselves memorialise people and things of the past.
 

These Smelltopias are invisible, yet somehow more immediate and tangible than words and historic photographs

Jiang recognised that societal expectations of the size and shape of our noses, more than other sense organs, can raise intense gender and racial identity sensitivities. An unconventional subject in art, the nose here is celebrated.

The nose ocarinas would have been incomplete without air and so the artist invited musicians, composers and audience members to fill out the story with their breath. She intended for the soft bulbous form of the noses to seduce participants to playfully engage with the work. The score by Hollander is written for “three nose shaped ocarinas inspired by the relation between nose and ear, scent and sound. The score is an expression of processing airborne stimuli, whether it’s a pressure wave or a cloud of odorous molecules, into information with associative memories before it diffuses and fades.” During one performance, three different scents were sprayed into the audience to further reinforce the connection. The air-quality-inspired music was haunting and melancholy, rising and falling in slow, non-syncopated loops. The ocarinas were accompanied by other more common instruments, including a harp, keyboard and frame guitar. The transportive song used fleeting inputs to assemble an arrangement of novel relationships that proposed an alternative sensory understanding of place, latent stories of the city, of smelltopia.

These sensory investigations of urban space, memory, interpersonal connection, identity and activism reveal new ways of communicating and exploring our urban context. They ask difficult questions and present complex feedback connecting smell and remembrance as interactive art. They argue that our various senses can and should be used to reveal and convey the complex layers of stories and histories threaded throughout cities. These experiments in smelltopias are a call not only to look at the city, but also to stop, breathe and smell to stir past recollections and create rich new memories and understanding of place.

CREDITS:

ALAMEDA HEART NOTES:

SALT Landscape Architects, Allen Compton, Jose Devora, Ellen Epley, Jamie Heitner, Jisoo Kim, Grace Sullano, Hildegun Varhelyi, Eri Yamagata

Institute for Art and Olfaction:

Saskia Wilson-Brown, Minetta Roger

Partners:

Everybody.world, LA Design Festival, The Scent Bar

SMOG ORCHESTRA

Artist: Nova Jiang

Support: LACI AIR

Performance

Composer: Celia Hollander

Pianist: Hui Wu

Guitarist: Cameron O’Connor

Harpist: Ko Ni Choi