A new camera has been developed that can capture the whiff of your first pet or the smell of the seaside holiday.
Designer Amy Radcliffe’s MA project at Central Saint Martins set out to bring a more meaningful sensory dimension to storing our favourite memories.
What if you could recapture the aroma of that freshly baked birthday cake, or the scent of the wild flowers in that Alpine meadow on your last holiday? Or maybe you would choose to recall the musky pong of your first pet, or the comforting whiff of that shampoo your girlfriend used to use.
So how does it work?
The smell meant to preserved needs to be trapped in an odor trap from which the machine absorbs the scent. The scent is stored in the filter which is then analyzed so that the chemical nature can be decoded and the liquid fragrance of the same can be generated. The time taken for generation may vary from a few minutes to a few hours.
Madeleine, interestingly refers to some special kind of cake, an apt name for the product that can be used to store and generate wide number of food essences.
The point is that such technology is just waiting to be exploited and one Amy Radcliffe has now come out with the Madeleine, a camera of sorts which captures scents instead of photos. The moniker is derived from Marcel Proust’s seven-volume French novel, À la recherche du temps perdu (In Search of Lost Time), which explores involuntary memory invoked by biting into a piece of Madeleine cake. Radcliffe talks about being able to manipulate our emotional state through ‘prescribed nostalgia,’ a term that inspires paranoia in our heads.
