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Smells of Auld Reekie on a very breezy day in 2011

Within an ocular-centric culture smell is marginalised, but as a tool for comprehending our world it plays an essential role. The installation artwork “Smells of Auld Reekie” addresses the question of how the perception of smell might be better understood in terms of our experience of the cityscape, and how this might be represented through mapping and cartographic design.

In Vagueness Gridlocked: Margioles suggests that smells are “notoriously difficult to capture or record” (2006: 110) and research methods in this field remain in the early stages of development. The few existing Smell Maps that have been produced to date focus on scientifically measuring and replicating the smellscape, or locating individual smells through crowd-sourced online mash-mapping. However, whilst maps present a plan view, smells are constructed from a human perspective on the street, creating what “seems to be a contradiction between ‘smelling’ and ‘mapping’” (2006: 110). In developing “Smells of Auld Reekie” my research question addresses how an artwork can combine elements of visual design and smell representation in order that each might augment an understanding of the other in relation to a named city.

The methodology for data collection incorporated smellwalks and interviews with a cross-section of residents conducted within a psychogeography theoretical framework. “Smells of Auld Reekie” is innovative in its use of a combination of original symbology, traditional cartographic design and naturally-occurring smells in the form of bottled scents as the final installation artwork. The new knowledge generated is an insight into the olfactory landscape of the city of Edinburgh and an understanding of the movement and dissipation of smell in that landscape. “Smells of Auld Reekie” is the first visual-olfactive, interpretative map in which the audience contribute to the artwork, thus bringing a human perspective to the mapping and representation of the smellscape.