Olfactory Objects: Scent, Attention, and the Post-Immersive Turn

Emily Endo, Nymphaeum (2024). Fragrance, shell (siratus alabaster), volcanic stone, glass, 23.5 x 23.5 x 9 inches. Image courtesy of the artist and Marta. Photo: Erik Benjamin. 

Geosmin, a compound responsible for the smell of wet soil and petrichor, the earthy scent after rain, is a bacterial byproduct that our noses detect at vanishingly low concentrations, more than almost any other naturally occurring compound. Some scientists believe that our sensitivity to this scent evolved because geosmin signals the presence of fresh water or fertile soil, helping humans locate resources vital for survival.¹ When we detect geosmin, it activates specific olfactory receptors and can trigger strong memory and emotional responses. For me, that fresh smell has always signaled a reset, as well as nostalgia, clarity, and a sensation of being connected to nature.

In Southern California, where water has always been both scarce and engineered, geosmin becomes more than a smell; it’s a sensory reminder of the systems (from the ecological to the political to the bodily) that sustain life. Artists like Emily Endo, Se Young Au, and Sarana Mehra have mobilized this kind of olfactory trigger in their artistic practices. Their works reveal how olfaction can serve as a medium for narrative and memory, offering an experience that hints at a different form of immersion, one that follows a sensory logic that moves through memory pathways and into the limbic system. This type of viewer immersion stands in sharp contrast to the digitally amplified environments that have dominated the past two decades, where novelty, scale, and visual intensity overwhelm the nervous system and trigger dopamine reward cycles.

Last decade’s immersive economy shaped how audiences engage with art, transforming experience itself into a commodity of visual and affective consumption. Beginning in the early 2010s with high-profile installations like Random International’s Rain Room (2012) and the launch of Meow Wolf’s House of Eternal Return (2016), the immersive turn emerged alongside social media and new projection technologies that merged entertainment, marketing, and installation art into a single visual regime. Between 2019 and 2022, at least half a dozen companies across North America and Europe staged competing immersive Van Gogh exhibitions.² Moving through these environments is closer to navigating a staged set rather than encountering an artwork. In these spaces, visitors are guided through directed pathways of light, sound, and large-scale projection, often pausing to take photos as the installations prompt a continuous cycle of watching, recording, and sharing. These experiences turn artists’ imagery into a franchised template for mass-produced “experiential” culture. These so-called immersive environments also monetize attention, converting physical presence into shareable content.

In her 2006 essay “The Mediated Sensorium” art historian and critic Caroline A. Jones observes that “each new wave of technological innovation brings us…still more elaborate fantasies of a fuller sensual life, while at the same time sharpening the feeling that our sensual past is receding.”³ For Jones, the issue is not nostalgia but how shifting media environments reset our sensory norms. As the spectacle-driven immersive economy reached saturation, its own mechanisms began to reveal their limits. What once promised emotional connection increasingly produced exhaustion, a cycle of image consumption mistaken for experience. Yet from this fatigue, another mode of practice has emerged.

What artists reveal through their use of scent is a broader shift: a move away from large-scale environments engineered for affect and attention capture, toward forms of embodied experience that anchor the viewer in their own sensorium. This post-immersive shift does not abandon stimulation but re-orients it through the body in a process that contracts scale, slowing perception and rerouting attention from vision to sensing, bringing the sensual past into the present. Scent, in particular, resists capture. It eludes the image economy and compels the body to register presence in real time.

Sarana Mehra, Vent (2022). Clay, resin, sand, foam, wood, metal, air diffuser, scent, dimensions variable. Image courtesy of the artist. Photo: Institute of Art & Olfaction. 

In 2025, Ether: Aromatic Mythologies at Craft Contemporary was the museum’s first exhibition centered on scent. Featuring works by Au, Mehra, Sean Raspet, Karola Braga, and other artists working in installation, sculpture, and olfactory design, the exhibition unfolded within the main gallery space where each artwork created its own atmospheric pocket, some offering diffused environmental scents, others delivering more focused olfactory encounters through vessels, sculptural forms, or interactive components. Together, the works formed a sensory field that invited visitors to move slowly, tuning into smell as a primary mode of engagement. Curated by Saskia Wilson-Brown, founder of the Institute for Art and Olfaction (IAO), the exhibition framed olfaction as narrative and as material. Maki Ueda’s Olfactory Labyrinth ver. 8 – The Revival of Oikaze (2025), for instance, suspended dozens of small scent-filled bottles from a gently moving mobile; as the air shifted, notes of wood, herbal smoke, and florals drifted through the space, deconstructing the olfactory elements in a scene inspired by the Japanese novel The Tale of Genji. “What made this exhibition possible,” Wilson-Brown told me, “was this openness to consider scent as a form of creative expression on par with any other.” The timing is not incidental. When Wilson-Brown founded IAO in 2012, “there were maybe a couple dozen artists working with scent, globally. Today it’s far more common. It’s not enough to fill a gallery with the scent of earth, anymore. How are we expanding the medium as a creative expression? The new generation of artists working with scent are faced with this challenge, and this is good: It’s gone beyond a gimmick.” The proposition of Ether was that immersion can be atmospheric and embodied without being photogenic. “Olfactory work is a little less conducive to [immersive] fatigue precisely because it is un-Instagrammable,” Wilson-Brown said. “I couldn’t share it, like it, forward it. I had to live it. This has value.”

In the exhibition, Sarana Mehra presented a series of three sculptural works resembling unearthed ancient votives. Grainy, textured objects in clay and plaster, each bore the faint imprint of a face or partial corporeal form. One of the sculptures, Vent (2025), omitted a custom scent called Dyspnea created in collaboration with IAO in the wake of the pandemic. Taking its name from the clinical term for shortness of breath, the fragrance is intentionally unpleasant, recalling halitosis or bad breath to force awareness of breathing and proximity. The sculpture visibly vented vapor from a slitted mouth, creating an atmosphere that is both communal and contaminating. The piece proposes that embodied immersion is not always pleasurable. It can evoke vulnerability and disgust.

Se Young Au, Meet You At No Gun Ri (Unbridgeable Gulf) (2025). Image courtesy of the artist and Craft Contemporary. Photo: Sara Pooley.

Se Young Au’s Meet You At No Gun Ri (Unbridgeable Gulf) (2025), also included in Ether, built a site for mourning. A straw mound shaped like a coffin, crossed by a dark long braid and flanked by silk banners, recalled the Korean chobun, the temporary grave where a body decomposes before the bones are permanently buried. The accompanying scent, derived from the unmistakably musky costus plant, similar to unwashed hair, anchored the work in corporeal reality. Standing before the piece, grief registered not as an idea but as a physical current. The sensation moved straight through my body, sharper than almost anything I had felt previously from a single artwork. And it was not by looking; it was about being in the atmosphere the work produced. Later reflection on the feeling I had when viewing Au’s work clarified how scent enters through the body to construct a world of association and memory. Au remarked that “scent asks the audience to be present, to be embodied.” As an art form, olfaction positions the audience as a receiver rather than a viewer. Collectively, these artists propose a model of immersion that is diffused and calls the viewer into a sensory realm, reframing immersion as attentiveness rather than overstimulation.

Artists who engage with sensory mediums are recalibrating toward lived experience, a shift that finds clear articulation in the work of Emily Endo, whose sculptures and scents build quiet worlds that unfold through duration and proximity. In Endo’s sculptures, scent moves through glass tubes and into porous stone, slowly seeping and pooling until the object becomes a circulating system. When we spoke, Endo was preparing for their largest installation to date, which will open in early 2026 at the Kohler Arts Center in Wisconsin. In describing the work and its sensory logic, Endo described the atmospheric environment: Suspended glass vessels shaped like elongated droplets and mirrored bulbs hold custom fragrances that drip onto carved stone forms. Resembling mineral remnants, the stones absorb and diffuse the scent over hours, creating an immersion of scent and material in the space. Endo works alchemically with metal, glass, and stone, pairing fragile, transparent chambers with dense, grounding materials. The scent composition for the Kohler work draws from geosmin, petrichor, ozone, orchid extracts, and metallic notes inspired by the iris plant, alongside marine notes, referencing qualities of glass materials. Together, these aromas unfold in time, with the top, middle, and base notes emerging in sequence, creating a sensory narrative about the permeability of the body and the movement of water through stone, skin, and air. Rather than relying on visual dominance, Endo’s work operates through duration; the longer you stay with it, the more its material and olfactory logic reveals itself. The work asks for time, reiterating an idea that several of the artists I spoke to for this essay noted: Olfaction is a time-based medium.

Before working with scent, Endo created visually spectacular installations built from large constructed environments and sculptural elements like glass and horsehair. Their shift toward scent marks a deliberate move away from visual dominance and material footprints. Their goal shifted from image-making to constructing materially modest yet sensorially dense environments in which the nose becomes a direct line to memory and affect. Situated in the High Desert, Endo’s studio resonates with Southern California’s long tradition of treating perception itself as material, with the light, air, and environment as active agents in creating an artistic experience. This openness underwrites a lineage of ephemeral practice as in the perceptual investigations of the Light and Space movement of the 1960s and ’70s, and the conceptual use of weather, light, and atmosphere in later environmental and installation-based works. Today, the IAO and artists like Endo use scent to merge environment and body, folding spatial environment and perception into the work itself.

Maki Ueda, Olfactory Labyrinth ver. 8 – The Revival of Oikaze (2025). Image courtesy of the artist and Craft Contemporary, Los Angeles. Photo: Marc Walker.

Scent extends that lineage of the Light and Space movement while resisting the visual economy that once enveloped it. Instead, scent engages an ecology of place and memory. Au’s use of the costus plant renders grief as bodily and intimate, conjuring the smell of holding a loved one close. Mehra’s anti-fragrance marks air as risk. Across these works, scent becomes a way to work directly with earthy and bodily materials, not as representations but as ephemeral atmospheres that unfold through time. Au describes scent as a way of building landscapes, and each of these artists creates environments that can only be apprehended somatically. The viewer must experience it through their own sensing body.

In his essay “Air,” philosopher Bruno Latour reflects on Peter Sloterdijk’s concept of “sphereology,” asking what it means to be in the world.⁴ To be in is to be “inside some sphere, some atmo-sphere.” Art and nature, Latour argues, have merged into a “continuous sensorium.”⁵That description read literally inside Ether. The artworks were not containers for images but devices that conditioned an atmosphere. They revealed immersion as an existential condition: These works didn’t transport the viewer elsewhere; they sharpened somatic awareness of the spheres we already inhabited.

If the last decade of immersion revealed the limits of visual spectacle and overstimulation, the next might center on the nervous system, drawing on the systems that help us feel grounded and on the limbic pathways where memory and emotion take shape. Scent introduces a tempo that contrasts the rapid pace of modern life: slower, somatic, durational. Taken together, works by Mehra, Au, and Endo articulate the beginnings of a different sensory logic. Here, olfactory practice is a method for foregrounding permeability, interdependence, and the subtle registers of experience. The proposition of the post-immersive is not a retreat from technology but a return to the body as an instrument of knowing. Sloterdijk’s sphereology and Latour’s writing on air are useful because they reframe environment itself as medium: something we are always inside, shaping, and shaped by. Artists working with scent and atmosphere don’t simulate immersion; they expose its infrastructure. Because these works make environment perceptible as medium, they imply ecological responsibility. What comes next is an expanded field of sensory experimentation that asks us to slow down, be embodied, and reimagine with the worlds we are already inside. The post-immersive isn’t just about a solitary experience, it exposes the ways in which we are all interdependently connected, breathing the same air.

Emily Endo formulating scents for an upcoming project. Photo: Emily Endo.

Vera Petukhova is a Los Angeles–based curator originally from Minsk, Belarus and co-founder of Rip Space, a DTLA project space focused on new media and future-oriented art practice. Her work centers performance, moving image, experimental practice, and sensory research. She received her MA in Curatorial Practice from the School of Visual Arts. She has curated exhibitions at The Bronx Museum, CalArts, and Detroit Art Week, with past roles at Performa, The Kitchen NYC, Visions2030, and Tribeca Festival.

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