Olfactory Media Library: Atmospheres as Shared and Multispecies Commons

In this presentation, we will give an overview of our project, the Olfactory Media Library (OML): a moveable expandable field research and creation station, equipped with modules containing DIY olfactory tools, technologies, and instructions for tuning our noses to our atmospheres. We will also introduce the project’s website (launching January 2025), which will serve as both an online archive of project documentation and repository of open-source tutorials and resources for techniques and DIY devices for experimental scent practices and atmospheric monitoring. We aim to invite contributions from other multisensory practitioners like those here at Uncommon Senses V.
The central objective of OML is to develop and share new creative practices in socially-engaged olfactory art that directly engage with topics of atmosphere and risk, and provoke imagination and discourse about shared climate futures. In 2024, the OML was activated within specific geographic and social contexts across the Canada/US border, in Braddock, PA; Chicago, IL; Winnipeg, MB; and Lacombe, AB where discussions of air quality and atmospheric futures are directly relevant. As a socially-engaged artwork, the proposed research directly engages with publics about air quality and climate futures in regions where these questions have historically and are presently directly negotiated.
Keywords: air quality, olfaction, atmospheric commons, multispecies, archive

Danielle Wilde & Leena Naqvi (Umeå Institute of Design, Umeå University, Sweden)

Digesting Cultures

This paper explores food as a vibrant tool for embodied imagining and relational engagement in co-creation workshops. We discuss three workshops that leverage food as material and method to make visible unspoken ideas, emotions, and relational dynamics that may otherwise remain hidden. Informed by Haraway’s concept of "mattering", we activate more-than-human-food-entanglements through everyday activities such as cooking together, constructing scaled models, or making yoghurt, to reveal ecological and socio-political interconnections. In "Digesting Data," food is used to translate fishers' lived experiences into policy discussions through meal co-creation, making the fishers’ lived realities tangible, immediate and ‘tasty’ for policymakers. In "Shit!" foodstuffs are used to externalise internal bodily processes, providing a visceral reimagining of what typically remains hidden. In "Culturing Connection" yoghurt-making becomes a collaborative exploration of human-microbial relationships, transforming the act of fermentation into a shared inquiry into eco-cultural entanglement. These approaches exemplify how food can be more than politically and ecologically- charged sustenance; can be a sensory tool for relational engagement that enables participants to connect abstract ideas with lived experience. The method contributes to research into multisensory ways of understanding and exploring matters of engagement, offering experiential/embodied pathways between material practice and reflective inquiry.
Keywords: embodied imagining, food, mattering, more-than-human, culture(s)