Eat the Data, Smell the Data, slides from the workshop presented at Eyeo Festival 2014 with Tega Brain. This workshop explores possibilities of presenting data as sensory experience. How can we work with data in ways that move beyond that of the visual? How can data or data combinations be physically represented, sensed, felt or tasted? How does the experience of data change how it is understood? We will explore provocative and artistic ways to experience data by working through a number of exercises involving taste and fragrance. What non-visual aesthetic tactics and strategies can be used to develop a rapport between data and experience?

1. Eat the data,
smell the data.
School for Poetic Computation - Eyeo 2014
Tega Brain @tegabrain
Simona De Rosa @derosimona

2. Welcome

3. How do we experience outside of
the visual and aural domain?

4. Can we design sensory data experiences?

5. How can data be made visceral ?

6. Data visceralizations as:
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representations of information that don’t rely solely and primarily on
sight or sound, but on multiple senses including touch, smell, and even
taste, working together to stimulate our feelings as well as our thoughts.

7. 1997 patent for precision
fragrance dispenser apparatus
Hans Laube 1959 smell-o-vision patent

8. What is odour?

9. Odour is:
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“odorants” are small, volatile molecules. They have diverse structures
and somehow those different structures and their combinations are
perceived as having different odours.
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It is estimated that humans can sense as many as 10,000 to 100,000
chemicals as having a distinct odour.

10. Odour is:
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all of these “odorants” are small, volatile molecules. However, they have diverse
structures and somehow those different structures and their combinations are
perceived as having different odours.
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It is estimated that humans can sense as many as 10,000 to 100,000 chemicals as having
a distinct odour.

11. Olfactory perception:
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The olfactory pathway. Odorants are detected by olfactory sensory neurones in
the olfactory epithelium. Signals generated in those neurones are relayed
through the olfactory bulb to the olfactory cortex and then sent to other brain
areas.

12. Kant, 1798
Smell + language:
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“All the senses have their own descriptive vocabularies, e.g. for sight, there is red,
green, and yellow, and for taste there is sweet and sour, etc. But the sense of
smell can have no descriptive vocabulary of its own. Rather, we borrow our
adjectives from the other senses, so that it smells sour, or has a smell like roses
or cloves or musk. They are all, however, terms drawn from other senses.
Consequently, we cannot describe our sense of smell”
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13. Maniq:
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a language spoken by only 240– 300 people living in
hunter gatherer societies in southern Thailand, identifies
many more words for odour qualities and a deep
appreciation for the world of olfaction.

14. Olfactory perception:
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context
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concentration
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combination
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cultural association
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history of exposure
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15. Smell exercise
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1. identify the scent
2. describe it in 3 adjectives
3. how does it make you feel?

17. What is flavour?

18. We eat with our eyes, nose, ears and sense of touch.

19. What is taste?
What is flavour?
How do we taste?

20. Taste is:
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the sensation produced when a substance in the mouth reacts chemically with the
receptors of our taste buds. (btw — they are all in our mouth not just on our tongue)
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21. Taste is:
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the sensation produced when a substance in the mouth reacts chemically with the
receptors of our taste buds. (btw — they are all in our mouth not just on our tongue)
!
Taste is restricted to five detectable qualities: sweetness, saltiness, sourness, bitterness
and umami.

22. Taste is:
!
the sensation produced when a substance in the mouth reacts chemically with the
receptors of our taste buds. (btw — they are all in our mouth not just on our tongue)
!
Taste is restricted to five detectable qualities: sweetness, saltiness, sourness, bitterness
and umami.
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Taste along with smell determines flavours.
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23. Taste is:
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the sensation produced when a substance in the mouth reacts chemically with the
receptors of our taste buds. (btw — they are all in our mouth not just on our tongue)
!
Taste is restricted to five detectable qualities: sweetness, saltiness, sourness, bitterness
and umami.
!
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Taste along with smell determines flavours.
!
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Although many factors such as colours, texture, temperature and sound play an
important role in food sensation, only 20% of a tasting experience comes from taste,
that is from the taste buds and 80% comes from the smell of the aroma.
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24. So what does make a flavour ?

25. Is it the tongue or the nose that create the
experience of flavour?

26. An aroma compound, also known as the odourant, the aroma fragrance or the
flavour, is a chemical compound that has a smell or odour.
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This occurs when two conditions are met: firstly the compound needs to be
volatile, so it can be transported to the olfactory system in the upper part
of the nose.
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Secondly it needs to be in a sufficiently high concentration to be able to interact with
one or more of the olfactory receptors.
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27. So can we measure flavour components in food?

28. We can determine a product's flavour profile through gas chromatography which
is an analytical technique that separates and identifies the various components of the
flavour.
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And because we are able to identify flavour components we now know that same
flavour compounds can be found in multiple ingredients.

29. Let’s try it

34. Taste exercise
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1. identify the flavour
2. describe it in 3 adjectives
3. how does is make you feel?

35. Smell and flavour are a repository of feeling and
memory:

36. they can transport us instantaneously to the time
and place we first experienced it,
or experienced it most memorably.

37. Some examples

38. What the Frog’s Brain tells the Frog’s Nose, 2012
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http://tegabrain.com/The-frogd-Nose

40. Data Cuisine
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http://data-cuisine.net/

42. Is ma` Wurscht - corrupted sausages
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http://taste-of-data.tumblr.com/