‘Reading Ingeborg Bachmann’s short story collection The Thirtieth Year, we might hear in Bachmann, who was part of the Group 47 post-war writers, another Austrian, one who would go on to attack the group at a talk in the mid-sixties: Peter Handke. The attack at Princeton University in 1966 helped make Handke famous as he insisted that writers like Heinrich Boll, Gunter Grass and Martin Walser offered “descriptive literature”, and he was there to offer something new. Handke was in his mid-twenties and making a name for himself as he created a new space against others, but we might feel that he would have had more sympathy for Bachmann, whose work, written in the post-war years until her death in 1973, has the lacerating force on her fellow, younger Austrian. (Indeed, days after her death, Handke dedicated a speech to Bachmann after winning the Buchner prize.) We might describe this quality as the prose of righteous disregard: a feeling towards the self that isn’t at all sanctimonious as it refuses to find dignity in one’s actions, nor caricature as it acknowledges the absurd but never funny inadequacies of the human. Unlike fellow Austrian writer Elfriede Jelinek (who adapted Bachmann’s novel Malina for the screen) she doesn’t push the prose into the sustained hysteria Jelinek often offers as she tears into Austrian conformism and sexism with great syntactical energy. What both Handke and Bachmann share is an acuity of observation that suggests the autobiographical as reflective lucidity. It does not seem to be about creating characters (which is why it can appear so autobiographical) but it is not at all about detailing the experiences of their lives either. It is instead about exploring a character from the inside of their chaos and the interior nature of that search excavates the fictional, refuses to give the work a novelistic breadth and instead finds in it a particular type of breath. Irmela von der Luhe quotes Christa Wolf saying of Bachmann’s work: “while reading this prose one should not expect stories or the descriptions of actions…one will hear a single voice, bold and complaining.”

‘A particular passage in the long story ‘Three Paths to the Lake’ helps explain this breath. Here the central character Elisabeth realises that when she would tell Viennese friends about her glamorous life working as a photographer in Paris and New York, people would be fascinated, but she would wonder about the substance of her tales. “Anyone who happened to be listening could easily have had the impression that they were catching a glimpse of that different world, a shimmering and fascinating place, for Elisabeth’s accounts were told well and with a sense of humour, but at home, with her father, the stories crumbled into nothing; not only because Herr Matrei wasn’t in in the least interested but also because she noticed that, although she had actually experienced it all, then again she hadn’t, there was something bleak and empty in all these stories…” It is as though Elisabeth is trying to find her breath; a way of speaking that can speak for her and not about her. The anecdotal tales furnishes a social occasion without elaborating a personal need: “she never spoke about her own life.” The anecdote served a purpose but it hardly expressed a self, and its limitations were met not by her father’s indifference, but how she could see in her father’s company how impoverished these anecdotes were. Earlier in the story, Elisabeth thinks about a man who has been tortured and somehow managed to write about his experiences. How did he achieve it, she wondered, thinking “this man had attempted to discover what had happened to him when his soul was destroyed and to learn how a human being could change and continue to live, defeated, with that knowledge.” The contrast between the anecdote offered and the personal catastrophe illuminated might be where the difficulty of literature often resides. Though many will talk of the problem of literature as an historical one, that literature becomes ever harder to write, its existence harder to justify, and schools forming to try and maintain literature’s significance, Bachmann would seem suspicious of this, saying, “when we look back on the past half-century, on its literature with its chapter-headings of Naturalism and Symbolism, Expressionism, Surrealism, Imagism, Futurism, Dadaism, and a great deal that refuses to fit under any chapter-heading, it seems to us as though literature has been developing in a completely miraculous albeit somewhat inconsistent manner, exactly as it always has done, as it did in earlier ages—first there was Sturm und Drang, then Classicism, then Romanticism, and so forth.” Bachmann adds, “it is not especially difficult to acquire a working knowledge of these periods; but the present leaves a fair amount to be desired; we cannot properly see how it is developing, where it is headed; nothing is getting any clearer, not even the sense of a direction or directions.” This was during one of a series of Frankfurt lectures in 1959, with Bachmann determined to escape from ready-made, overly theoretical or historical approaches to the literary. It is not that the silence comes because of a historical set of circumstances (like the Holocaust), or a literary development, like the Absurd; it stems more from a personal necessity that could strike any writer, at any time, and that it is perhaps this silence which allows literature to manifest itself. …

‘It is this point we were addressing when we noticed similarities between Bachmann and Handke: an autobiographical tone that isn’t the same as autobiography; the sense of an immediate consciousness rather than a series of events viewed through character and situation. “We are indeed sleeping, are sleepers, out of the fear of being obliged to perceive our world as what it is” Bachmann proposed in her Frankfurt Lectures, but Bachmann wants a literature that will wake us up. This is perhaps the contemporary version of catharsis and must be found not through a chain of events that will lead to tragedy and emotional release, but must be called something else and manifests itself through a chain of non-events shaped by a radical interior consciousness. In the Frankfurt Lectures, Bachmann also says “our existence today lies at the intersection point of so many mutually unconnected realities that are chockful of the most mutually contradictory values.” She adds, “within the confines of your own four walls you can cultivate a domestic idyll in the patriarchal vein or libertinage or whatever else you like—outside you’re whirled about in a functional world of utility that has its own ideas about your existence.” Perhaps one needs to integrate the disintegration, to find a means by which to acknowledge the disparity between the anecdotal details that we say to others are our experiences, and the chaos inside that cannot so easily be narrativised.’ — Tony McKibben

 

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Further

Ingeborg Bachmann @ Wikipedia
Feminize Your Canon: Ingeborg Bachmann
Ingeborg Bachmann’s “Malina” Is the Truest Portrait of Female Consciousness Since Sappho
Book: ‘The Critical Writings of Ingeborg Bachmann’
Ingeborg Bachmann @ goodreads
“The outrageous has become the everyday”: Remembering Ingeborg Bachmann
Life? Or Theater?
Ingeborg Bachmann: Her Part, Let It Survive
Book: ‘Correspondence: Ingeborg Bachmann and Paul Celan’
A singular woman adrift
THE LIMITS OF LANGUAGE
The Architecture of Fascism in Ingeborg Bachmann’s ‘Malina’
“The end, we failed it. Both of us.”
Ingeborg Bachmann’s Rome
The Meticulous One
Life-in-death: an agonizing in-between
Society Is the Biggest Murder Scene of All: Adrian Nathan West on Ingeborg Bachmann’s “Malina”
Ingeborg Bachmann and Peter Handke: The Austrian Mitteleuropa
The plague novel you need to read is by Bachmann, not Camus
Buy ‘The Thirtieth Year’

 

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Extras

Ingeborg Bachmann reads ‘Alle Tage’ / Every Day 1961

Ingeborg Bachmann reads ‘An die Sonne’ / (A Paean) To the Sun 1961

INGEBORG BACHMANN | EXIL

Interview with Elfriede Jelinek (on Ingeborg Bachmann)

 

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The Horror Is in You
by Reed McConnell

 

‘I refuse to begin this essay with Ingeborg Bachmann’s death—the cigarette that set fire to her apartment in Rome while she was sleeping, the three weeks she spent lingering in a hospital burn unit, the ultimately fatal medical complications that resulted from her addiction to benzodiazepines—because to do so would be to reduce the rich life of one of the most important writers of twentieth-century German literature to its salacious end. But the impulse is common. Bachmann’s death is regularly treated as a synecdoche for her life, and it’s true that a great deal of her work deals centrally with death, depression and murder; that at the time of her death, in 1973, she was working on a cycle of novels called Ways of Dying; and that the final pages of its first and only volume, Malina, seem to prefigure a death by burning. But it’s also true that Bachmann saw violence and horror as integral to everyday life. A student of Ludwig Wittgenstein—who famously wrote, “whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent”—Bachmann’s preoccupation with the unspeakable, from the horrors of the war to the everyday lives of women, is the only clear thread that runs throughout her oeuvre.

‘Bachmann was born in 1926 in Klagenfurt, Austria, the daughter of a homemaker mother and a schoolteacher father who was an early member of the Nazi Party. She was an avid reader, extremely nearsighted, and by all accounts spent most of her youth with her nose in a book. Once the war ended, she spent a year studying at the universities of Innsbruck and Graz, then moved to Vienna in 1946, where she began a degree in philosophy with minors in German literature and psychology. At 21, she met Paul Celan at a party thrown by the Surrealist painter Edgar Jené. The as-yet unknown Romanian Jewish poet and Holocaust survivor was awaiting a visa to move to Paris. Within days of their first meeting, he was showering her with reading recommendations and filling her apartment with poppies. Their relationship would become one of the most storied in German letters before ending in 1952, when Bachmann proposed marriage to Celan, only to learn that he was already engaged to another woman. (She’d known nothing about their relationship.)

‘In 1951, soon after completing a doctoral degree in philosophy—closer to a master’s degree by today’s standards—Bachmann took a job at Rot-Weiß-Rot,1 the radio station of the American forces occupying Vienna. The job served as her entrée into the wider German-language literary world, as it was there that Bachmann met Hans Werner Richter, leader of the famous Gruppe 47 literary meetings, to which she secured an invitation in 1952. A year later, Bachmann won the Gruppe 47 Prize, the organization’s highest honor, for reading four poems from what would soon become her first collection, Die gestundete Zeit, or Borrowed Time. Featuring vermin, machines and a natural world at once hauntingly beautiful and horrifyingly violent, the poems evoked the terrors of a war still reverberating through Europe.

‘It was the beginning of a meteoric rise. At 28, merely five years after graduating from university, Bachmann appeared on the cover of Der Spiegel sporting boyish cropped hair and bold lipstick, the very image of a young iconoclast. In the following years, Bachmann lived in Rome, Naples, Munich and Paris; wrote libretti for the composer Hans Werner Henze, a close friend; advocated for nuclear disarmament; and published more poetry and fiction, releasing her first book of short stories in 1961. In 1958, she began dating Max Frisch, a Swiss writer fifteen years her senior. Their tumultuous four-year relationship ended when Frisch, then 52, left Bachmann for a 23-year-old college student, Marianne Oellers. (A fan of both writers, Oellers first met Frisch when Bachmann invited her to their apartment in Rome for dinner.)

‘Bachmann never seems to have recovered the happiness, imperfect though it may have been, that she had experienced living with Frisch. After their break in late 1962, she moved to Berlin, where she spent a year living on a fellowship from the Ford Foundation. She hated the city and became deeply depressed, and it was around this time that she began drinking and taking benzodiazepines. It would be years until she finally published her only novel, Malina, in 1971. A second book of short stories, Three Paths to the Lake, appeared in 1972, just before Bachmann’s untimely death in 1973. …

‘The glorification of the deaths of depressed woman writers has seen a renaissance over the last decade. In 2013, Vice took down from its website a fashion shoot from the pages of its “Women in Fiction” issue, depicting, among others, Virginia Woolf, Sylvia Plath and Iris Chang in the act of killing themselves, their clothing carefully detailed next to each image, so that you, too, could buy a pair of stockings like the ones that Taiwanese writer Sanmao used to hang herself. The editorial was swiftly condemned, but a certain set of conditions of possibility are necessary for such an editorial to be conceivable in the first place. Women writers are often given a tragic cast—and as tragic figures, they are rendered powerless, not necessarily as individuals who do not fight but as individuals who are kept from ever winning by an oppressive society.

‘Bachmann is clear: the tragedy went far beyond her role as a woman or as a feminist artist, even though these themes were central to her writing. The gendered suffering and violence endured by women on an everyday basis was merely one manifestation of a threat much more general in its scope, for patriarchal domination was itself fascist. Bachmann commented explicitly on this in an interview shortly before her death, saying, “I’ve thought about where fascism begins. It doesn’t begin with the first bombs dropped, it doesn’t begin with political violence, which one can write about in any newspaper. It begins in relationships between people. Fascism is the first thing in the relationship between a man and a woman.”

‘If there is a limit to what language can express, Wittgenstein gives us no reason to think that everything beyond this limit must be dark. If the inexpressible is understood to include the horrors of the Holocaust, then it should, too, hold room for the impenetrable mysteries and everyday wonders of nature, time, compassion and God. But for Bachmann, the inexpressible was necessarily horrible, and her task as a writer thus both urgent and ultimately futile: to bend language over backwards in an attempt to traverse its own limits and awaken her readers to the true conditions of a world that was merely biding its time before realizing its deepest—and darkest—potential.’

 

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Book

Ingeborg Bachmann The Thirtieth Year
Holmes & Meier Publishers

‘This is collection of the stories written by a distinguished Austrian author who died in 1973. Reading these stories entails abandoning the terms of one’s own comfort. The author’s relentless vision demands that readers allows themselves to be hypnotised, taken over by her repetitive cadences and burning images of grief and loss. And yet, in the beauty of her images there is a tremendous affirmation of the world.’ — Holmes & Meier

‘The Thirtieth Year, a collection of seven short stories published in 1961, was Bachmann’s prose debut following the poetry collections with which she rose to fame in the 1950s. The majority of the short stories in the collection focus on turning points in the protagonists’ lives, which briefly allow the central protagonists to glimpse another world, or attain insight that was previously denied to them. Bachmann’s The Thirtieth Year collection is primarily concerned with language (in particular, the utopian hope of refashioning the world through a new language), the persisting legacy of the Second World War, transgression (of boundaries and social norms), and issues of memory and identity.’ — Katya Krylova

Excerpt

from Youth in an Austrian Town

On fine October days, as you come out of the Radetzkystrasse, you can see by the Municipal Theatre a group of trees in the sunshine. The first tree, which stands in front of those dark-red cherry trees that bear no fruit, is so ablaze with autumn, such an immense patch of gold, that it looks like a torch dropped by an angel. And now it is burning, and the autumn wind and frost cannot put it out.

Who, faced with this tree, is going to talk to me about falling leaves and the white death? Who will prevent me from holding it with my eyes and believing that it will always glow before me as it does at this moment and that it is not subject to the laws of the world?

In its light the town too is recognizable again, with pale convalescent houses under the dark hair of their tiles, and the canal that every now and then brings in a boat from the sea which ties up in its heart. The docks are undoubtedly dead now that freight is brought to the town quicker by train and lorry; but flowers and fruit still fall from the high quay onto the pondlike water, the snow drops off the boughs, the melted snow comes rushing noisily down, then washes back and raises a wave and with the wave a ship whose bright-coloured, sail was set on our arrival.

People rarely moved to this town from another town, because its attractions were too few; they came from the villages, because the farms had grown too small, and they looked for accommodation on die outskirts where it was cheapest. Here there were still fields and gravel pits, big market gardens and allotments on which year after year the owners grew turnips, cabbages and beans, the bread of the poorest settlers. These settlers dug their own cellars, standing in the seepage. They nailed up their own rafters during the brief evenings between spring and autumn, and heaven knows whether they ever in their lives saw the ceremony that takes place when the roof is put on.

This didn’t worry their children, for they had already grown familiar with the ever-changing smells that came from far away, when the bonfires were burning and the gypsies speaking strange languages settled fleetingly in the no-man’ land between cemetery and airfield.

In the tenement in the Durchlasstrasse the children have to take off their shoes and play in stockinged feet, because they live above the landlord. They are only allowed to whisper and for the rest of their lives they will never lose the habit of whispering. At school the teachers say to them: ‘You should be beaten till you open your mouths. Beaten. . . .’ Between the reproach for talking too loud and the reproach for talking too softly, they settle down in silence.

The Durchlasstrasse, Tunnel Street, did not get its name from the game in which the robbers march through a tunnel, but for a long time the children thought it did. It wasn’t until later, when their legs carried them farther, that they saw the tunnel, the little underpass, over which the train passed on its way to Vienna. Inquisitive people who wanted to go to the airfield had to walk through this tunnel, across the fields and right through all the embroideries of autumn. Someone had the idea of putting the airfield next to the cemetery, and the people in K always said it was convenient for burying the pilots who for a time made training flights here. The pilots never did anyone the favour of crashing. The children always yelled: ‘An airman! An airman!’ They raised their arms towards them as though to catch them, and stared into the cloud zoo in which the airmen moved among animals’ heads and masks.

The children take the silver paper off the bars of chocolate and whistle the Maria Saaler Geldut on it. At school the children’s heads are examined for lice by a woman doctor. The children don’t know what the time is, because the clock on the parish church has stopped. They always come home late from school. The children! They know their names when put to it, but they prick up their ears only when someone calls out ‘Children’.

Homework: down strokes and up strokes in neat writing, exercises in profit and loss, the profit of new horizons against the loss of dreams, learning things off by heart with the help of memory aids. Their task: to learn an alphabet and the multiplication tables, an orthography and the ten commandments, among the fumes of oiled floors, of a few hundred children’s lives, dwarfs’ overcoats, burnt India-rubbers, among tears and scoldings, standing in the corner, kneeling and unsilenceable chatter.

The children take off old words and put on new ones. They heard about Mount Sinai and they see the Ulrichsberg with its turnip fields, larches and firs, mixed up with chars and thorn bushes, and they eat sorrel and gnaw the corn cobs before they grow hard and ripe, or bring them home and roast them on the glowing embers. The stripped cobs disappear into the wooden box and are used as tinder, and cedar and olive wood is laid on top, smoulders, warms from far away and casts shadows on the wall.

The time of trophies, the time of Christmases, without looking forward, without looking back, the time of the pumpkin nights, of ghosts and terrors without end. In good, in evil — without hope.

The children have no future. They are afraid of the whole world. They don’t picture the world; they picture only the geography of a hopscotch square, because its frontiers can be drawn in chalk. On one or two legs they hop the frontiers from one region to another.

One day the children move into the Henselstrasse. Into a house without a landlord, into an estate that has crawled out tame and hidebound from under mortgages. They live two streets away from the Beethovenstrasse, in which all the houses are spacious and centrally heated, and one street away from the Radetzkystrasse, through which the trams run, electric-red and with huge muzzles. They have become the possessors of a garden, in which roses are planted in the front and little apple trees and blackcurrant bushes at the back. The trees are no taller than the children, and they grow up together. On the left they have neighbours with a boxer dog, and on the right children who eat bananas and spend the day swinging on a horizontal bar and rings which they have put up in the garden. They make friends with the dog Ali and compete with the children next door, who always know better and can do things better.

They prefer to be by themselves; they make themselves a deu in the attic and often shout out loud in their hiding place, trying out their crippled voices. They utter little low cries of rebellion in front of spiders’ webs.

 

 

*

p.s. Hey. ** David Ehrenstein, Ah, the classics. I think I did a scratch-and-sniff post here where they were lauded. Yes, RIP Ronnie Spector. ** Dominik, Hi!!! The meeting was a good start. We have to draft up a proposal for what we want and want to do and submit it, but it looks likely that we’ll get funded. I hope. Mm, it’s hard to describe what we want to do when one hasn’t seen the version we showed, but we want to make it more complicated and interactive, and there were things that were too expensive and time consuming for the designers to do with the limited funds/time we had that we would like to add/implement, and we would like to make the piece/game playable by people. Right now it can only be demonstrated via guided walkthroughs. Yeah, I just had a moment yesterday where I saw a bunch of mermaid memes and questioned the human populace’s imaginative powers. But there are worse things. Your love of yesterday is far more inspiring to the imagination. Well, IMHO. Love devoting the rest of his life to finding the boy with the noisiest butthole on the internet, G. ** _Black_Acrylic, Slurp, curry. I can’t do fiery chilies, though. After a bad bout of acid reflux in my 20s, my stomach laid down the law. But yum notwithstanding  them. I’ve heard of ‘Succession’, and I like Brian Cox, so I’ll list it. Thanks, bud. ** Jamie, Hey! Ha ha, interesting about your super nasal powers. I can imagine that gift coming in not handy at all. Ooh, that experimental film club does sound totally dreamy. Experimental film is one of my most giant life crushes, as you can probably tell. Nice line-up. Non-stop goodies. I thought I’d done an Eddie Gehr post, but I just checked and I haven’t. Head + lit lightbulb = me. My day was alright. Might’ve possibly started the process of getting funding to finish the Home Haunt videogame-like project. Saw a film, Angela Schanelec’s ‘I Was at Home, But …’. It was very interesting like she usually is, but its decision making was too forefronted. All I could see was the editing, filming, framing, etc. decisions, and it made the film too dry and exercise-y. But I’m glad I saw it. Did some emailing and texting. ‘A Short Film About Killing’, wow, interesting. I hardly remember the film, or rather its doings. Vegan pâté … that’ll be hard to top, but I’ll, you know, try. Gonna look at some art and attend a lecture thing today, so maybe. I hope your Friday is better than the sky. Tall order, but … ** David, Hi. I don’t think my nose is very high powered or something. People are always saying ‘What’s that smell’, and I sniff the air like a dog and can’t smell anything. I’ve only done VR on those old roller coasters they fit with VR to make them seem exciting, and I’ve only ever gotten really nauseous. ** Brian, Hey, Brian. As often is the case, I think I got some offshoot whim and decided to see what smell tech options there are, and lo and behold the batch seemed like a watchable post. There’s the Bachmann post up above. Personally, I would start with her great novel ‘Malina’. That’s kind of her ultimate thing. I’ll try to find my way into ‘Euphoria’, probably for the very reasons you found it of interest. I give up on books all the time. Sometimes because they don’t interest me, and sometimes because I feel like I’ve read enough to get what they’re doing and what their pleasure source is and how they work, and I don’t feel like I need any more of them. But I don’t read very many books where the plot and narrative are paramount, mind you. So, I don’t think bailing is a problem at all. No, I can’t say the ‘Wizard of Oz’ had any competition from my yesterday, but that would be asking lot. Yours sounds like it gave ‘TWoZ’ a bit of a run, though. Hope your Friday doesn’t stand outside your bedroom window at 3 am with an acoustic guitar serenading you with James Taylor’s greatest hits. ** Okay. Today I spotlight a fine book by the very fine scribe Ingeborg Bachmann. Please give it a shot. See you tomorrow.

* (restored)
—-

‘Scentography promises a vast extension of sensory space, with profound implications. We’ve lost touch, as a species, with our sense of smell. Our noses are not on the ground anymore, because we don’t have to hunt for food. Scent became an art perpetuated by the big fragrance houses in Europe, and the average person was not empowered. You cannot create a new smell, communicate about it, talk about it. But now we can change that. Our mission is to make scent accessible to everyone. We’re giving back to humanity our ability to communicate using scent.’ — Marc Canter, founder of Macromedia

____________

‘Engineers at the Tokyo Institute of Technology have developed an odor recorder that can analyze scents and reproduce them by combining the 96 chemicals packed inside the device. Not only will it be able to approximate the smells of the finer things of life such as freshly-baked bread or apple pie, but it could also help doctors to diagnose remote patients by whipping up a hell of a stench with smells of urine, bile and rotten egg farts.

‘You point the device at an object, and then it records its odor using 15 chemical-sensing microchips, or electronic noses. It can then transmit that data to another device in a different location, or save it for later playback. So far, the system has been able to accurately record and play back the scent of orange, lemon, apple, banana and melon, and it’s said to be able to demonstrate the difference in scent between a red and green apple. The researchers hope to implement the device for online shopping, where you’ll be able to smell before you buy, and also in various virtual-reality environments.’ — gizmodo.com

Successful odor detection by mosquito olfaction

 

____________

‘Redefining the home theater experience with the sense of smell is what the SMELLIT concept is all about. Based on the idea of a DVD player, it attaches to your home theater, and gives you the aroma of what’s cooking on the TV screen, in a literal sense. The “smell CARD” of the SMELLIT decodes all the smell information and gets your head turning every time a new dish appears.

‘The device, created by Nuno Teixeira, works like the ink jet printer, though in contrast, it houses 118 cartridges for purification instead of the ink cartridges. The SMELLIT releases the fragrance of the picture on the screen as concentrated “smell gel” that’s evenly distributed by a central fan. So, next time a chef’s cooking a meal on TV, you know how it smells if not how it tastes.

‘As your DVD player reads the video and sound information from your favorite DVD disc, SMELLIT processes the same DVD, but the “smell CARD” decodes all the smell information from 10 to 20 seconds, depending on how far you are from the SMELLIT, ahead of the actual scene so that the odors have time to reach the spectators.

‘After decoding the smell information, the cartridge vaporizes a very small amount of concentrated “smell gel,” and the central fan distributes equally the smell in all directions. All of the 118 cartridges can be easily changed and last three times more than a regular ink cartridge, so you don’t have to worry you’ll run out of smells unexpectedly.’ — gadgets.softpedia.com

 

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‘Imagine the smell of brownies drawing your attention while you roam the aisles at your neighborhood market. The scent isn’t coming from the mix inside the box, but from an electronic label programmed to release a bit of aroma every time a shopper walks by. The new labels aim to get consumers to buy more by emitting tantalizing smells.

‘”If you got coffee, they’ll send out the coffee aroma when they sense you’re coming by,” says Peter Harrop, Chairman of IDTechex, the printed electronics company behind the new technology. “The label will also talk to you when you touch it, in addition to giving you print that may scroll, like on your computer, to give you instructions in whatever size font you want.” The new labels will cost about $.4 each. The cost is about triple that of current labels.’ — WCBS-TV

 

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‘Researchers at the University of Southern California in LA has patented a project that would allow US Army officers to use coded smells to give orders. These can be delivered silently, in the dark and when loud noise is drowning out speech. Furthermore, says the patent, the immediate reaction to a smell is emotional, rather than rational, so an odour trigger may encourage people to carry out orders without question.

‘A collar would hang round a soldier’s neck. The collar has a dozen cartridges, each containing a wick soaked in smelly liquid, a valve and a small propeller fan. Remote radio signals open selected valves and kick fans into life. A soldier could be trained to associate specific actions with unmistakable odours. This would allow the smells to be used to jog memory – if you smell this, do that.

‘The system could also make training more realistic, with soldiers getting whiffs of desert dust, sea water or mud that are synchronised with audio and visual cues. The collar is close to the wearer’s nose, so the effect is immediate, and rapidly fades when the valve is closed.’ — We-make-money-not-art.com

 

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‘Rain Showtechniek, a Dutch company that specialises in lighting, special stage effects and sound systems, has developed a machine that reproduces the traditional smell of bars and cafes. “There is a need for a scent to mask the sweat and other unpleasant smells like stale beer,” said Erwin van den Bergh, a spokesman for the company. “People find that smells such as Mocha coffee, Havana cigars or cigarettes can be about good moods and different ideas of living well.”

‘Unlike the real thing, the artificial tobacco smells do not have any health risks and does not linger in the hair or clothing of bar customers. “Geurmachines” come in different sizes and prices, ranging from giant smell-makers, costing £3500 for exhibition halls to smaller and cheaper scent devices for cafés, priced at £440. Over 50 different scents are offered for the new machines ranging from tobacco aromas to the smell of leather, freshly baked bread or new cars.’ — The Telegraph

 

____________

‘CamSoda, an adult entertainment webcam platform and among the first to use virtual reality in cam girls’ work, is developing smell-o-vision custom-picked by their models. Like its recent forays into virtual reality, it’s hard to tell how serious CamSoda is about the technology and how much of it is just a promotional stunt, but smell is a sensation other developers are seriously trying to bring into VR, so it’s worth considering how it might be used with porn.

‘CamSoda’s gas mask-like device is comprised of several interchangeable canisters, a heating element, and Bluetooth to connect it to your smartphone. They’re offering 30 scents to start, including “private parts,” “body odor,” “fragrances,” “panties,” “aphrodisiacs,” and “breath.” Viewers can use an app to control the scents’ strength or turn one off altogether. The company is taking pre-orders and hopes to ship by the spring. The mask plus 30 scents costs $99, with additional scent cartridges priced from $5.99 to $9.99.’ — Vice

 

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‘The latest trend in food packaging: Jars and boxes lined with “smell technology” emit molecules that push against their contents, infusing the items with different flavors. The concept, however, is steeped in real science: Researchers have discovered that most of what we call taste happens not in our mouths, but through our noses. Aromas, in essence, can trick your brain into thinking you are tasting certain flavors.

‘An upstart called ScentSational Technologies, founded in 1997 in Jenkintown, Pa., is working with a number of food companies to harness the science of smell. The aim: to produce tasty products without sugary additives like corn syrup or expensive ingredients such as heavy cream.

‘ScentSational Technologies says it is working with a baby-food producer to add an odor to the seal of its caps so that when parents open the jars, they can smell “freshness”; it’s also collaborating with a cereal maker to add fragrance to plastic bags, “sweetening” the product while actually reducing the amount of sugar. ScentSational Technologies founder Steven Landau says he can’t disclose clients’ names because the projects are still in the experimental stage.’ — Fortune Magazine

 

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Digital scent movie projector with sound channel
United States Patent Application 20080043204
Inventors: Guo, Yixin (Ronkonkoma, NY, US)
Application Number: 11/588154
Filing Date: 10/27/2006

A Digital Scent Movie Projector with Sound Channels. Its features include: A Digital Movie Projector, A sense of smell signal converter and a set of scent making devices. A digital movie projector uses a full frequency sound channel as its passageway to transmit sense of smell digital signal or adding a sense of smell digital signal transmission passageway besides the several full frequency and a low frequency sound channel. After being processed by the sense of smell signal converter the sense of smell signal is transmitted into the scent making devices. The scent making devices uses the scent transmission passageway to transmit the scent of the scent can into the pressure-reducing valve and sound muffler, with help of the air compressor and the controlling valve. And finally the scent is released into the cinema from the scent outlet devices installed under or by the audience seats. With this proposal and without any modification to a digital movie projector, the sense of smell signal can be programmed into digital movies and can be projected utilizing one of the full frequency sound channels of a digital movie projector. Therefore it enables the film arts to break the monopoly of traditional film and truly realizes the trinity enjoyable effect of sense of sight, hearing and smell.

 

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‘A group of Savannahians have teamed up to produce the world’s first scent-enabled music album. The first CD equipped with scent-technology is UNLEASHED by ZAN, who lives and records in Savannah. ZAN and her band play a mix of Pop, Funk Rock and New Age music. For the scent-enabled CD to work, one must purchase a Scent-Dome that plugs into a computer. As the computer plays songs, the teapot-sized Scent Dome releases different fragrances triggered by code embedded in the CD.

‘The company that invented the technology for ZAN’s scent-enabled CD is TriSenx Holdings Inc., also based in Savannah. TriSenx beat out a number of other research and development firms in a multimillion dollar race to create and patent the technology. Founded in 1999 by Ellwood Ivey, Jr., TriSenx’s mission is to develop multi-sensory products that enable digital olfactory diffusion, especially in the field of education. Its patent-protected technology is available for licensing in a variety of fields-of-use.’ –Techgiant.com

 

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‘AromaJet.com announced today that it has demonstrated interactive transmission of Synthesized Smell over IP (IPsmell(TM)). Using an interactive program that allows for the creation of aromas by mixing sixteen separate ingredients in 1% increments, Dr. David B. Wallace, AromaJet’s Chief Technical Officer, transmitted a number of distinct fragrances from Sidney, Australia to an AromaJet Kiosk at AromaJet’s offices in Plano, TX. Both Dr. Wallace’s portable computer and the AromaJet kiosk were connected to the Internet and communicated with each other through AromaJet’s SmellServer(TM).

‘Within seconds of sending a fragrance from Dr. Wallace’s computer, the AromaJet Kiosk received the data required for it to create the aroma. A description of the fragrance was sent and displayed to AromaJet engineers in Plano asking if they wanted to accept it. After accepting the fragrance, the kiosk immediately generated the scent from a given set of ingredients, using AromaJet’s patented aroma generation hardware & software.’ — Gameadvance.co.uk

 

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‘Philips introduced its amBX range back in 2005 – a group of interlocking technologies that it hopes will revolutionise the gaming experience and extend the gaming world out of the screen and into the real world. Now, Philips is preparing to add ‘smell-o-vision’ to the mix. The initial amBX experience took us a step towards a full ‘sensory surround experience’ through colour, sound, rumble and even an air flow-enabled device.

‘Over the next year, Philips is looking to step up the amBX experience by introducing smell and heat technology to really make us feel the games that we are playing. The senior director of program management at amBX told HEXUS.gaming that, ‘Tests are being carried out to tweak the smell technology. At the moment we can can produce the smells – but we’re still working on getting rid of them’.’ — Impact Lab

 

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‘When fragrance is used in spatial designs, it is mostly for branding purposes or for suggestive advertising (e.g. pumping the smell of coffee out onto a street to lure people into a shop).

‘Scents of Space, by Haque Design and Research, tries to explore the potentials for developing evocative and memorable experiences using the sense of smell. This interactive smell system allows for 3D placement of fragrances without dispersion, enabling the creation of dynamic olfactory zones and boundaries.

‘Airflow within the space is generated by an array of fans. Moving air is then controlled by a series of diffusion screens to provide smooth and continuous laminar airflow. Computer-controlled fragrance dispensers and careful air control enable parts of the space to be selectively scented without dispersing through the entire space.’ — Kunstvist.nl

 

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‘Mobile phone manufacturer Motorola wants to make using your phone a more fragrant experience. It was recently granted a patent for a way of making a handset release scents by heating a special cartridge. It was inspired by the way plug-in air fresheners work. The patent notes that it might not be necessary to modify a phone’s design much. Tests showed that the power amplifier in some Motorola phones reaches about 60ºC – hot enough to activate the fragrance in a disposable gel sachet.

‘Abstract: A communication device such as a cellular telephone (200) includes a heat-generating device (206) that generates heat energy. In thermal proximity to the heat-generating device (206) is a scent package (208) that includes a scented substance that is activated by the heat generated by the heat-generating device (206). In one embodiment of the invention, the heat-generating device (206) is a power amplifier. In another embodiment of the invention, a method of providing a scent in a communication device comprises providing a heat-generating device and placing a scent package in thermal proximity to the heat-generating device. The heat-generating device can be a power amplifier used by the communication device, or other electrical circuit found in the communication device.’ — New Scientist

 

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‘Frederik Duerinck isn’t a jeweller, but his next project is a necklace. This piece, though, doesn’t feature a precious stone as a pendant, but rather a small box. Right now, it measures a slightly unwieldy 5cm by 5cm (2in x 2in), but Duerinck is determined to shrink it down to the size of a die. It is no simple ornament either.

‘Inside the cube is a battery and scenting system designed to deliver a puff of fragrance on demand that Duerinck describes as a “scent bubble”. The Netherlands-based entrepreneur is the co-founder of startup Scentronix, which already operates a perfume printing machine. That device uses an algorithm to build a bespoke scent based on a customer’s answers in a questionnaire. But now Deurinck wants to deploy the same technology in miniature so that digital scenting can be mobile.

‘Wear one to the movies, for example, and you could use an app on your phone to program it to play along, dispensing discreet scents at key moments. The ultimate device is nowhere near ready, Duerinck acknowledges – its current size and battery life are hurdles, as is the quality of the scent and the projection. But he remains optimistic. “We have proof of concept with our prototype, and there’s nothing out there right now which works that way, so we’re applying for a patent.” The next step, he hopes, is to finesse it enough to win over investors and secure funding for further development on a wearable version.’ — BBC

 

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‘Having a video chat with a friend or colleague is all about seeing and hearing — at least for now. But experiments conducted recently in Malaysia suggest it may be possible to develop “electric smell” technology capable of conveying odors as well as sights and sounds.

‘The research is preliminary and not without its critics. But if electric smell pans out, long-distance conversations could one day be far more immersive — enabling you to share with a loved one the aroma of a meal you just prepared, for example, or letting you catch a whiff of the sea from your sister’s beach vacation.

‘“It’s not just about the smell,” said Adrian Cheok, one of the scientists behind the experiments. “It is part of a whole, integrated virtual reality or augmented reality. So, for example, you could have a virtual dinner with your friend through the internet. You can see them in 3D and also share a glass of wine together.”

‘In real life, odors are transmitted when airborne molecules waft into the nose, prompting specialized nerve cells in the upper airway to fire off impulses to the brain. In the recent experiments, performed on 31 test subjects at the Imagineering Institute in the Malaysian city of Nusajaya, researchers used electrodes in the nostrils to deliver weak electrical currents above and behind the nostrils, where these neurons are found. The researchers were able to evoke 10 different virtual odors, including fruity, woody and minty.’ — MACH

 

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‘The smartphone has certainly ushered in a state of hyper-connectivity, where the sharing of information over long distances, even to the other side of the world, is a simple tweet, email or Snapchat away. While these platforms offer up plenty of content for our eyes and ears, some feel that our noses are missing out on all the fun and have developed the oPhone, a Bluetooth-enabled odor emitting device designed to enable users to send smells to one another as a text or email.

‘Connecting to a user’s smartphone via Bluetooth, the oPhone allows odors, or “oNotes”, to be sent as an email, tweet or text message. It is the brainchild of Harvard Professor David Edwards and two of his design students, Rachel Field and Amy Yin, who have established Vapor Communications operating out of Le Laboratorie (Le Lab) in Paris to bring the device to market.

‘Four specially-designed “oChips” are built into the oPhone in order to translate these profiles into smells. These chips combine to allow the creation thousands of different scents, which when emitted form a cloud around six inches (15 cm) in diameter that lingers for 20 to 30 seconds. The oPhone isn’t the first device we’ve seen designed to allow odors to conquer the tyranny of distance.’ — New Atlas

 

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‘Adrian Cheok, professor of pervasive computing at City University London and the director of Singapore’s Mixed Reality Labs, decided to figure out the best ways to connect our other senses to digital environments. That definitely includes smell and taste, along with touch, and those sensations can be a bit more difficult to “render” with technology.

‘Previous attempts at recreating smell and taste required chemical emissions to provide those sensations, but that method was never practical and ultimately failed (see: Smell-O-Vision). Instead, Cheok wants to avoid creating stimuli and just manipulate your brain, as he explained in an interview with Motherboard:

“We want to transmit smells without using any chemical, so what we’re going to do is use magnetic coils to stimulate the olfactory bulb part of the brain associated with smell. At first, our plan was to insert them through the skull, but unfortunately the olfactory part of the brain is at the bottom, and doing deep-brain stimulation is very difficult. Anyway, our present idea is to place the coils at the back of your mouth. There is a bone there called the palatine bone, which is very close to the region of your brain that makes you perceive smells and tastes. In that way we’ll be able to make you feel them just by means of magnetic actuation.”

‘Cheok wants to create digital restaurant menus that let us smell each dish through our smartphones, software that makes us feel like we’re cuddling with our significant when they’re thousands of miles away, and even applications that can improve moods through target smells and tastes. Transmitting scent and tactile feeling has obvious applications in the virtual sex/pornography industry as well.’ — next.reality.news

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p.s. Hey. ** L@rst, Hi, L. Cool, happy you liked Muller’s stuff. Your link didn’t work, but I found the goods. Yeah, sweet. I love that kind of thing. I tingled. Nice about seeing Malkmus. I think I said this before, but, even though I’m allergic to reunion shows, I’m gonna go see Pavement when they play here this summer. Can’t help it for some reason. Big up. ** David Ehrenstein, Ah. Then I’ll watch ‘Nightmare’, probably on my laptop though. ** Dominik, Hi!!! Me too, and every day my answer is a more confused sounding ‘I don’t know.’ Thank you for tightness of your crossed fingers. Today there’s a meeting that might lead to funding to further develop/finish Zac’s/ Sabrina’s/ Puce Mary’s and my video game-like Haunted House project, so I’ll siphon off just a bit of yours crossed fingers’ magic for that. Your love’s attire + date sounds like the makings of a dream date to me, ha ha. Love eliminating the concept and mental image of the mermaid from the imaginations of everyone on earth, G. ** Jack Skelley, Hey, Skell! Nice recreating with your son there, dude. You’re a top of the line dad. I hope you’re right about this being my birth month because I need all kinds of presents! Smash your head on the punk rock, dude! ** _Black_Acrylic, Huh. Good question. I should’ve thought to look, silly me. ** Bill, Hey. I know Dave a little, and I think he works from photos, but I do think those records are undoubtedly in his unbelievably gigantic vinyl collection. Yeah, I’m thinking ‘Nightmare’ via soap2day is the way to go. ** Jamie, Hey, hey, J. Thanks! ‘Prayers’ that that ‘tentative’ is out of the equation soon. Oh, man, that experimental film group project sounds like heaven. What have you seen there? Or seen that you especially liked or didn’t? Paris continues to feel pretty normal and easy re: Covid. Mandated masks outdoors, although a lot of people aren’t. Nothing’s closed. Huge venue concerts restricted or cancelled, but most concerts/shows happening as usual. Vax/booster pass needed to enter everything that isn’t just a store. But it feels strangely chill and unencumbered here. Even though the new cases continue to shoot up and up. Odd, really, but I’m not complaining. You have a Thursday that’s like a high speed month. ** Niko, Hi, Niko. I’m happy my thoughts helped. Yeah, as long as you’re obsessed, it should be fine. That’s my general policy about my things. Do let me know what happens, and enjoy the intensity of the writing and fixing. There’s no greater pleasure, in my opinion. Take care. ** David, Hi. Dude, you’ve had so much sex it makes even my active imagination’s theoretical jaw drop. I’m going google Hilbre. Sounds, you know, very beautiful, the whole day. Curry too. Chips even. I need boots. My feet are like ice sculptures. ** Steve Erickson, Congrats on the laptop and Miike work return! Mm, possibly, re: that work you saw on FB. It’s hard to imagine a film of less interest than that new ‘Scream’. Thanks for confirming my ennui. ** Brendan, Hi, B. Awesome that my fave songs found some favor with you. There are few bodies of work better than the original Alice Cooper band at their peak: ‘Love it to Death’ -> ‘Billion Dollar Babies’ ‘Killer’, from whence ‘Halo of Flies’ came, is my fave. There’s an awesome Melvins cover of ‘HoF’. Every time I listen to ‘Here Come the Rome Plows’ I think it’s the greatest song ever recorded. I feel very happy and hungry about a possible ‘Safer at Home’ post, no surprise. Yeah, that would be ultra-stellar if you don’t mind. Thanks a zil, maestro. ** Paul Curran, Hi, Paul. Happy you dug his stuff. I did wonder whether Ishida’s genitals might sneak its way into your novel. Wow, the Apocalypse Party thing is a short novel by you? Holy shit, that’s such great, great news! I’m already dying for it. Awesome, man! And with a Kier-based face! Such good news, Paul. Huge yay. ** Brian, Hey, Brian. I think charming works. I’m down with charming. Oh, btw, the performances of Gisele’s and my ‘Crowd’ at BAM are in October. I don’t know the exact dates yet, but I’ll let you know. It’s doing a little North American tour: NYC, Minneapolis, Montreal, Los Angeles. The Mishima story was called ‘Thermos Flasks’. I have a post on a book by Ingeborg Bachmann coming up later this week. She’s amazing. Oh, wow, ‘Gone’, yeah. I’m glad you’re finding stuff in there. It’s still kind of weird to me that it was made public, but I signed off on it. Yes, the destruction/ censoring of it was and remains a huge shock and source of great anger for me. And they (Fales) lied to me about it until they were forced to admit to having done it. Ugly. Anyway, thanks for giving it brain space. I never watch TV shows, but I have heard buzz about ‘Euphoria’. Hm, maybe I’ll a dip into it and see. Thank you for the witchy energy. Oh, god, it would be so great if that funding comes through. I hope your Thursday is like that tornado in ‘The Wizard of Oz’. ** Right. Here’s an odd, nerdy old post from my murdered blog that I decided to restore for reasons that escape me at the moment. See you tomorrow.