SCENT HACKATHON

january 2018, mediamatic, amsterdam.

When we classify scents, what structures do we adopt? When we speak about scent, what language do we use? Can we do better?

These are the questions we will explore and possibly answer over three days of talks and participant-led workshops, in the world’s first Scent Hackathon, at Mediamatic in Amsterdam.

ABOUT

The IAO teams up with Klara Ravat (Smell Lab, Berlin) and curator Caro Verbeek in a weekend devoted to dismantling, analyzing and (potentially) restructuring how we classify odors, and exploring how we communicate about – and with – scent. The theme of the weekend was inspired in part by Sissel Tolaas‘ work with NASALO, as well as other pioneering work around language and scent taxonomies.

The weekend program starts with a special edition of Caro Verbeek’s Odorama: ‘Reading scents: experimental approaches to preserving and describing aromatic heritage’, where Peter de Cupere, Kate McLean, Laura Speed and Cecilia Bembibre will present the work they have done with language and olfaction. The talks will be supplemented by a performance by Han van der Vegt and Klara Ravat.

The following day, we initiate our two-day “hackathon”. This will start with a brief talk by Cecilia Bembibre about existing scent taxonomies, a talk by Caro Verbeek about existing olfactory vocabularies (and current and past efforts made in this realm), and a smelling session led by Saskia Wilson-Brown where we find the classification language for materials that don’t easily slot into existing scent structures. Klara Ravat will then help self-directed working groups set goals and outcomes, and we’ll get to work.

By the end of the weekend of smelling, problem-identifying and – yes – hacking into existing structures and aromatic archetypes, we hope to be able to present an enhancement on how we use existing language to describe scent, and a re-invention of how we classify odorants. We also hope to experiment with assigning data-driven meanings to specific aromatic chemicals.