Sniffing Out the Differences

Sniffing out the differences is a series of installations that questions our identity in this globalized world through the medium of multisensory experiences, with olfaction playing a leading role. The project explored smell as an interactive medium to build narratives and was rooted in the belief that cultural exchanges between different South Asian communities could be traced through the journey of scents. We collected scents from all over India for this project.

Olfaction, as a key cultural descriptor, can be easily felt by someone coming from outside the culture. Whether it is the spicy scent of a bazaar or the tranquil smell of petrichor, most people can relate to their backgrounds with certain smells. Research into these personal olfactory associations, cultural sensibilities, and rising xenophobic tendencies have led us to build culture-specific olfactory experiences. 

Odors are strongly associated with emotionality and evocativeness. In many aspects, odors have been shown to even supersede music, a widely considered emotional stimulus, as emotion-evoking memory cues. The temporal unfolding of the event is primarily emotional, followed by a contextual understanding which enables us to produce a truly emotional reaction from the user. The mechanism of building an episodic odor memory involves using a variety of stimuli, including odor, geared towards producing a specific user reaction.

Our interest in olfaction as an interaction medium led us to conceptualize Sniffing out the differences as a series of installations that act as a dialog between our identities in today's globalized world in which we hold more than one, articulated through smell and pattern visualization. It questions how our life experiences have impacted our current identities and points out the commonly unnoticed differences caused by them. It further lets the audience experience a culture with its distinct smells and interact with it, thereby making sense of that culture.

The five installations built as a part of this theme are titled Jallianwala Bagh, Identity stories, Mir Abdul Attarwala, Xeno 500, and Diversity in us. 

Installations