Discussion on Time as an invisible elephant in the room.
Olfactory time
In Proust’s In Search of Lost Time1, the narrator dips a madeleine cake in tea, and upon sipping the tea, is suddenly jolted into a vivid world of memory: ”Mais à l’instant même où la gorgée mêlée des miettes du gâteau toucha mon palais, je tressaillis, attentif à ce qui se passait d’extraordinaire en moi.” …a shudder ran through me and I stopped, intent upon the extraordinary thing that was happening to me.
Many if not most people have had the experience of smelling a fragrance and suddenly remembering a moment in childhood, a situation, a long lost emotion… This kind of surprise time-trip is not unlike a maze or labyrinth of life, where you drudge along monotonously for long periods of time, and then suddenly a wonderful surprise awaits behind a corner. It’s a portal to another situation, and if you can savour it, it feels like a part of you can actually live in the ”past” for a moment.
Why should this enriching experience be discounted? Could we embrace it as a legitimate part of the very structure of ”time”? If that were the case, and it were expanded further, fragrance would be liberated from its little niche of cologne and perfume, and could even become another branch of the travel industry – time travel.
Would you like to experience your grandma’s summer cottage again, the flowers and the lake and the grilled fish, same as when you were a child? Someone can go to the physical location and bottle the fragrances, or even find the olfactory memories in your brain-system and reproduce them for your enjoyment, along with a 360 degree audiovisual reproduction if needed for additional immersion. There are already smellwalks and smellscape mapping2 being done in space, the same is possible in the dimension of time.
This way we could have legitimate and real avenues to experience the past. And if that worked well, people would start to design olfactory experiences for present events. Technical research on synthetic smells and smell presentation is already ongoing3. Your child’s wedding could have a unique and pleasant design fragrance, only to be used a few limited times many years later, so you (or they) can experience and remember the wedding day together again on their 25th anniversary. Smell has a future dimension! Those with a damaged sense of smell might in the future even be considered to have a type of mobility impairment.
1 Proust, M. 1919 À la recherche du temps perdu, Gallimard, Paris, p.65-66. https://archive.org/details/larecherchedut01prou/page/64 accessed December 2020.
2 McLean, K.J. 2019, Nose-first: practices of smellwalking and smellscape mapping, PhD thesis, Royal College of Art, UK. https://researchonline.rca.ac.uk/3945 accessed December 2020.
3 Salminen, K., Rantala, J., Isokoski, P., Lehtonen, M., Müller, P., Karjalainen, M., Väliaho, J., Kontunen, A., Nieminen, V., Leivo, J., Andreea, A., Lekkala, J., Kallio, P., Surakka, V. 2018 Olfactory Display Prototype for Presenting and Sensing Authentic and Synthetic Odors, ICMI ’18: Proceedings of the 20th ACM International Conference on Multimodal Interaction, p.73-77. https://dl.acm.org/doi/abs/10.1145/3242969.3242999 accessed December 2020.
Interesting link of the day: job interviews after GPT.
Interesting link of the day: the shape of time.
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