Digitizing Scent: What Vaporware Can Teach Us About the Limits of Mediation

abstract: This article analyzes technologies that endeavor to mediate scent. While there have been several historical attempts at mediating olfaction, including through Smell-O-Vision in the 1960s, computer peripherals in the early 2000s, and virtual reality (VR) today, scent has remained a challenge for mediation. I argue that smell media represent a limit case for mediation itself. That smell media have remained in the realm of "vaporware"—more idea than actuality—is instructive about the limits of computer mediation and about persistent fantasies regarding the recording and transmission of sensory experience.