Do-It-Yourself Smell Map

Smell is slowly making its way to cartography, as illustrated by this installation by artists Jenny Marketou at the Esther M. Klein Art Gallery in Philadelphia (PA, USA):

“Smell It: A Do-It-Yourself Smell Map is an interactive visitor project created specifically for this exhibition. Visitors will be given a street map and then invited to walk around the neighborhood to record their olfactory experiences. Back in the gallery, viewers can add their odorous encounters to a wall-sized, collectively-drawn map to show the diversity of subjective responses to smell and the shifting of the neighborhood’s smellscape from one day to the next.

While smells are expected in the context of nature or in rural areas, to discover the olfactory in the midst of the concrete jungle is both a challenge and a thrill.”

Thanks to Tracey Lauriault (who has been doing a lot of work on smell and cartography) for sharing this info.