Camera (In)Odorata
A talk and installation
with Morana Alac & Evelyn Walker
March 1, 2018
Morana Alac and sculptor Evelyn Walker present ‘Speaking the Language of the Mute Sense in Everyday Practice of Olfactory Science’. In a combination of an installation (Camera (In)Odorata) and a talk, the collaborators explore the relation of scent to language.
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Olfactory language is often described as ineffable: we say that we cannot speak about what we smell. But what if, instead, we turn to places whose inhabitants speak about smell as a part of their everyday affairs? What if, for example, we pay attention to how olfactory scientists communicate when they prepare, run and analyze their experiments?
While not denying that Western languages lack specialized vocabulary for expressing olfactory qualities and that it feels difficult to talk about smell, events in a laboratory of olfactory science challenge the assumption of ineffability by questioning the ideas that animate it: that our sense of smell is an exclusively individual domain, and that human language is a through and through cultural system, fully composed of conventional signs.
Reflecting back on our own approach, we also engage the problem of rendering our observational material focused on olfaction.
This presentation, thus, incorporates Camera (In)Odorata—a multisensory installation meant to ask its visitors to live peculiar issues that olfactory scientists need to deal with, while immersing them in a smellscape that evokes olfactory laboratories across time.
ABOUT MORANA ALAČ
Morana Alač is an Associate Professor in the Department of Communication at the University of California San Diego. She holds PhDs in Semiotics and Cognitive Science, and is fascinated by what we tend to take for granted and not see as worth paying attention to in our ordinary engagement with the world.
ABOUT EVELYN WALKER
Evelyn Walker is an MFA student in the Department of Visual Arts at the University of California San Diego specialized in sculpture.
This presentation is supported by the National Science Foundation.