December 21st, 2009
Scents and Sensibilities
I am hideously behind in my documentation, so much so that I didn’t have anything up in time for the first day of the Winter Show. Which turns out to have been kind of a blessing, as I hadn’t really devoted much time to thinking about the project beyond trying to get it working. Which is uncharacteristic for me, though this project has been nothing if atypical.
The projects [1][2] I submitted to previous shows were polished and worked exactly as intended but were complicated to explain. They came with highly polished spiels that explained the hows and whys and, at least in my mind, completely airtight rationalizations for their existence.
But smells don’t bend to the will as easily as wire and LEDs. They’re invisible, often uncooperative, and, as I learned yesterday, highly subjective. The beauty for me of Scratch&Sniff has been the ease of its explanation (partly because the concept is simple: it’s a scratch and sniff television screen, and partly because I just haven’t had time to rationalize its construction beyond “wouldn’t it be cool if”) coupled with the growth of its meaning and interpretation while watching it in use.
In the past I’ve been afraid of allowing too much human element into my work. Both T.H.A.W. (a synthesizer interface that used a hairdryer and “melting” ice cubes) and Al-Gorithm (the paper output of a computer program written for a human being) minimized the subjective experience of the viewer/participant. They were both hermetic systems. You could like them or not, but you couldn’t really argue about how they worked or your role within them.
Scratch&Sniff on the other hand eschews all discourse in favor of an extremely simple concept that the viewer’s experience validates (or doesn’t, depending on the viewer). As at every show, the people I’ve spoken to have fallen into the three rough camps they always seem to:
- The Wowers: “This is so cool, how did you do it?”
- The Insiders: “This reminds me of a project by x at y, and have you thought about z?”
- The Skeptics: “What is the point of a smelly TV? How are you going to monetize it?”
The fascinating thing, though, has been how many people have taken issue with the project based not on how it works but on the smells themselves. “This smells like air freshener, not grass.” The technology vanishes! And what exactly does your TV smell like when you scratch it, I want to ask.
Another surprising thing has been the trepidation with which people approach scratching the screen (“Can I really push hard? Won’t it hurt the screen?”) coupled with the brute force to which they subject the obviously delicate surrounding foam core.
In any case, really interesting. I will post more once I get caught up with my documentation (and sleep) in the coming week.
ITERATION 4: During our performance, we asked our classmates to stand in the center of the room and make a new text, providing them with scissors and glue and a blank sheet of paper to work with while we read. Ten minutes later, we had sixteen very different results (pictured below), though all but one used only the words we provided and the majority respected word boundaries. In the discussion that followed our performance, people commented that our dress, our demeanor, and our (physical) positions of power within the room combined with the obvious cues provided by the glue sticks and scissors at each station to make it almost inevitable that people would cut up the text we’d provided unquestioningly.
To detect reflection, the emitter and receiver need to be installed completely flush to the same surface and about 10mm apart. I get good readings when holding them up to my eye, a variation of between 50 and a 100, good enough to work with.
