Tuesday, January 29, 2013

Making Sensory 1/29

Hello all, Welcome to the first week of Research Studio II: Making Sensory. Here's our checklist for this week:

 READ (+highlight/mark passages of interest for class discussion/your own work):
* Diane Ackerman, A Natural History of the Senses, "The Bloom of a Taste Bud"
* Rachel Herz, the Scent of Desire, excerpt

POST something you find interesting or relevant on the topic of smell/taste.
Posting should include your own response to the article, recipe, artist profile, science info etc. along with:
* relevant hyperlink(s), like this one on sensory deprivation mapping (!)
* a related image or video (from the site you're linking to, or just something you find that fits the topic) 

BRING to the next class...
* your marked-up readings
* CTA U-Pass card
* a little cash $ for a single grocery item. NOTE: credit cards may not be accepted where we're going. $5 should be sufficient.
* one shareable smell sample related to your personal experience.This can be something applied to the skin (oil, lotion, perfume), something diffused, sprayed or steamed into the air (if you have a device to do so), wafted from a jar when it is opened, etc.
please make sure it is NOT toxic or allergy-provoking!

If you have questions or have trouble posting to the blog, please email me sooner than later.

2 comments:

Unknown said...

IBM: Computers Will See, Hear, Taste, Smell and Touch in 5 Years
By Pete Pachal | Mashable – Sun, Dec 16, 2012
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Today's PCs and smartphones can do a lot -- from telling you the weather in Zimbabwe in milliseconds, to buying your morning coffee. But ask them to show you what a piece of fabric feels like, or to detect the odor of a great-smelling soup, and they're lost.
That will change in the next five years, says IBM. Computers at that time will be much more aware of the world around them, and be able to understand it. The company's annual "5 in 5" list, in which IBM predicts the five trends in computing that will arrive in five years' time, reads exactly like a list of the five human senses -- predicting computers with sight, hearing, taste, smell and touch.
[More from Mashable: Black Friday Sales Surge as Shoppers Stick to the Web [REPORT]]
The five senses are really all part of one grand concept: cognitive computing, which involves machines experiencing the world more like a human would. For example, a cognizant computer wouldn't see a painting as merely a set of data points describing color, pigment and brush stroke; rather, it would truly see the object holistically as a painting, and be able to know what that means.


MY Thoughts:I think this article from Yahoo is completely ridiculous. Why are they making robots that can have human senses. This is just a bad idea leading to chaos!!!

Thoughts on Reading: I thought the reading was very informative on facts we should know about ourselves and the things we eat. It is nice to know why we taste what we taste and how it can affect our emotions.(I think this is what we might call aura sometimes). I think words do really make you picture something and we grow on words that relate to smell that imprints in our brain and end up affecting us. I think all of this is very interesting to the human brain. I wonder what it would be like to create these enviornments for people to get possible reactions that I want. (I wonder if this is a start for manipulation).I just found the reading very detailed and descriptive in some parts and very enjoyable because I could feel and smell hte things it was describing as well.

Unknown said...

http://www.bellasugar.com/10-Interesting-Facts-About-Scent-Smells-15169338
- This is A site about interesting facts on smelling.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WavjbJhiRAE
This is an informative video on more of the anatomy of smell - it refers a lot back to the readings.- i found it helpful to see visuals