Many maps of olfactory experience fix smells in space and neglect to take account of their temporal nature. There are multiple rhythms involved in smell walking; walking pace, heart rate, sniffing rate, and smells are perceived for a period of time. “Taking a Line From Its Walk” is an animated mapping of seven people’s smell experiences on one shared walk. The animation accentuates the idea of repetition with difference and highlights rhythms of similarity and diversity. Moreover, the animation symbols fade, referencing decreasing smell intensity as a result of molecular volatilisation and human adaptation. The resulting superimposed wave patterns pulse and evince how smells might be subject to interference in the air.

On December 25th, 2016 a group of 13 people smellwalked Kyiv for two, frozen, hours.
Time: 1300h – 1500h
Temperature: High 1°C
Wind: W – 8.7mph

Speculating that future generations will foreground alternative sensory modalities as ways of knowing, this work treats smells as affordances of visual perception, equally facts of the environment and of human behaviour. This work is a mapping of ephemeral information along a route of woven, olfactory trails.

Porteous advocated the smellwalk as a tool for exploring the smellscape in his seminal 1985 paper citing a Lynchean model as his inspiration for how a smellwalk might manifest. The soundscape studies/acoustic ecologies field is full of useful reference and provides a theoretical reference for the practice and its provenance.

Smellwalking methodology is integral to my practice; this “reflection” traces the influences and links as I developed it over a period of six years.

Walking through the smellcape is a model to explore the volumetric properties of Singapore’s scentscape, previously visualised in Scentscape 06.215 Singapore.

This sculpture envisages human-centred experience of the smellscape as a dimensional form. The duration of each perceived smell was ‘measured’ by smellwalkers using a Likert scale of 1 – 7 and averaged in each neighbourhood. Additional layers of dots were added to represent increasing durations. The model takes a small section of the overall map and renders it in three dimensions.

Singapore prefers not to smell, instead it scents.

The city’s warm outdoor streets are redolent with ubiquitous frangipani and jasmine. Whereas interior public spaces tend to be olfactorily-curated to the extent that a local (albeit pungent) fruit, the durian, is forbidden. Commercial environments are frequently scented and carefully designed to demarcate brands in a shopping space.

Sometimes it is hard to imagine the possibility of any perceptible presence of everyday urban smells. Singapore is an island city state with a diversity of cultures, a preoccupation with food and a groundhog day equatorial climate. On what would its ‘citizen sensors’ remark through scentwalking the city?