Dark cinnamon gilded by edgy raw gunpowder; sweet ambrette and cloves
March 17, 2020 1:40 PM   Subscribe

Each scent brings back memories that once meant something important. They might still. But scents change their character as they slowly break down, and history moulders unless given air. Once in a while you clear an evening, unlock the chest, and unstopper your old selves to see what they are to you now.
Scents and Semiosis is a piece of interactive fiction by Sam Kabo Ashwell. You play a perfumer exploring your personal scent library, trying to glean some meaning from remnant traces of petitgrain, verbena, elecampane, and sweet apple.

-Author's notes

-A review by Victor Gijsbers.
Having been left mostly unmoved by the piece, and in a sense disappointed, since I think highly of its author, I decided to peruse the source code of the piece. And that's when things started to click for me. I'm not sure it's the same click that other people are looking for when they study procedurally generated texts, but I'll take any click I can find. So here's my new and updated take: the beauty and fascination of a piece like Scents and Semiosis is not so much in the texts it generates, although these of course need to have certain qualities; rather, it is in the machinery of the generation itself. It is in the thoughtfulness and creativity exhibited by the author when he constructed the algorithm. [...] What we're looking at is a semiotic machine, a machine that doesn't so much generate meaning, as it embodies it. There is of course a sense in which it spews out texts that the reader gets to interpret; but even more crucially, it is itself the result of thousands of acts of interpretation of its author. And knowing about those acts of interpretation actually gives more meaning to the texts that are generated. The fascination of the piece -- at least for me, and one would suspect for the author as well -- lies in seeing how the choices of the author end up generating the texts that end up being generated.
posted by Iridic (4 comments total) 24 users marked this as a favorite
 
I enjoy this little gem!
posted by DrMew at 6:45 PM on March 17, 2020


As someone who makes fragrance things for a living, I've often described it as "a writing exercise that happens to smell great." It's really cool to see playable art that also mirrors that approach.

So much of what we smell (and taste) is rooted in the power of suggestion, and I think that's where "scents and semiosis" absolutely nails it. I'm excited to experience this. :)
posted by raihan_ at 9:50 PM on March 17, 2020


Neat. I know someone who will appreciate this, which is more than I can say for most things
posted by aspersioncast at 10:27 PM on March 17, 2020


Sounds a lot like Toby's Nose, in which you play as Sherlock Holmes' dog, trying to solve a murder by sniffing things.
posted by escape from the potato planet at 3:57 AM on March 18, 2020


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