Scales that Embody Us: Smell Artifacts for a Contingent, Idiosyncratic, and Ambiguous Material Anthropocene

Abstract: The outsized environmental impacts of humankind have ushered in a new geologic epoch, most recognizablyknown as the Anthropocene. However, this name wrongly attributes the causes of ecological damage to humans uniformly,despite certain people and systems contributing more than others. Similarly, the visuals which often depict theAnthropocene are of a universalizing nature: Satellite images and aerial footage of human pollution, destruction, andextractive terraforming present such phenomena at spatial and temporal scales which exceed human comprehension(Demos 2017; Alaimo 2016). In this paper, I will posit a contrary view to scales which outscale our individual agency (Duerfard2012), and seek to find an Anthropocene that embodies us instead. I outline how sensory practices might interruptthis displacement of scale, and assemble these practices as a kind of artist “anarchive,” with a focus on olfactory artifacts.These provide embodied experiences as speculative interventions into the false remove (and false objectivity) of Anthropoceneimages. By proposing the chemical senses as means of encountering archival botanical and agricultural traces,I make a gesture linking anthropos bodies to the Anthropocene in scales which relate to our lived experience. Olfactory“artifacts” are ephemeral, process-oriented, active, and embodied, qualities which stand in contrast to the hegemonic,Western perspectives of the Anthropocene and typical depictions of it in visual media. Embodied contact with volatilechemicals can potentially encourage forms of “knowing” which counter the spectacle of the Anthropocene.