Recent Scholarship in Olfactory Aesthetics and Crossmodal Perception
Over the past year or so, I have been pleased to find my artwork cited in the respective fields of philosophy and psychology. One of my goals as an artist is to make work that contributes to life outside of what is narrowly defined as the “art world.” By this not only do I mean that I want to make work that dialogs with academic fields outside of art which share some affinity with my work, but that I want to make work that engages general audiences, which might not have a deep affinity for or knowledge of contemporary art. The articles listed below come from the respective fields of olfactory aesthetics and crossmodal perception. Both have been influential to my art practice, so it’s particularly nice that my work found a place there. But it just occurred to me that the artworks that are cited in these academic publications are some of my most popular (read: entertaining) projects, which makes me particularly happy to think that there is not a binary relationship between work that appeals to specialist scholars and work that appeals to the general public. May the reader find the following texts as thought provoking as I do.
Madalina Diaconu, “Being and Making the Olfactory Self. Lessons from Contemporary Artistic Practices,” in Olfaction: An Interdisciplinary Perspective from Philosophy to Life Sciences, Di Stefano N., Russo M.T. (eds). Human Perspectives in Health Sciences and Technology, vol 4. Springer, Cham.
Charles Spence, “Musical Scents: On the Surprising Absence of Scented Musical/Auditory Events, Entertainments, and Experiences,” in i-Perception, Vol 12 (5), 2021
Charles Spence and Nicola Di Stefano, “Crossmodal Harmony: Looking for the Meaning of Harmony Beyond Hearing,” in i-Perception, Vol 13 (1), 2022
Carlos Velasco and Charles Spence, “Capitalizing on the Crossmodal Correspondences Between Audition and the Olfactory in the Design of Multisensory Experiences,” Experiential Marketing in an Age of Hyper-Connectivity, N.p.: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2022
