Aesthesis
Scent as an Empathy Machine
The word “aesthetics” has drifted from its origin. In contemporary use, it names a category: art, design, the sensory dimension of things made for looking at. The Greek root, aesthesis, pointed at something more fundamental, the body’s capacity to feel, to be affected, to register the world before thought has time to intervene. Terry Eagleton, in a line Susan Buck-Morss made foundational to her 1992 essay “Aesthetics and Anaesthetics,” wrote that “aesthetics is born as a discourse of the body.” The original field took as its subject reality itself, corporeal and material, encountered through the skin.
Buck-Morss noticed something troubling in what modernity had done to this faculty. The same Greek root gives us both aesthetics and anesthetics, the word for medically induced absence of sensation. Two terms branching from a single source, one naming the capacity to feel and the other its removal. She argued that contemporary culture had produced a kind of cultural anaesthesia through overstimulation, sensory overload so relentless that the nervous system learns to stop registering. Sensation accumulates without landing. Overstimulated and numb at once, we stop taking in what passes through us. Art that soothes into passivity, generating the impression of having felt while leaving the nervous system undisturbed, participates in this project. It works as anti-aesthetic in the root sense, however moving it appears on the surface.
This framing puts pressure on a phrase that has traveled widely:
The Empathy Machine.
Roger Ebert applied it to cinema. Chris Milk applied it to virtual reality in a 2015 TED talk presenting Clouds Over Sidra, a documentary following a twelve-year-old Syrian girl through daily life in the Za’atari refugee camp. The logic of each claim is that if you immerse a viewer in someone else’s perceptual field, closeness follows. You see what she sees, you stand where she stands, and something in you moves toward her.
The critique of this logic turns on what “presence” actually produces. Research consistently distinguishes between affective empathy, automatic and reactive, and cognitive empathy, which demands interpretive effort and recognition of the other person as a subject with their own interior. Immersive experience tends to generate the first reliably while showing little durable effect on the second. The deeper problem is structural rather than methodological. When the viewer occupies someone else’s perceptual position, that person’s own perspective drops away. In Clouds Over Sidra, you occupy Sidra’s room as a ghost in it. The relationship the empathy machine promises turns out to be a relationship between the viewer and their own feeling, with another person as its occasion. Buck-Morss would recognize the dynamic. The aesthetic charge is there, but the aesthesis, the open, other-directed capacity to be affected, closes down at the exact moment the headset goes on.
So what about a sense that never puts you in anyone’s place to begin with? VR closes that capacity down by seating you behind another person’s eyes. Olfaction does nothing of the kind. It reaches the body by a wholly different route, and the difference seems worth following.
Most sensory information travels through the thalamus on its way to conscious awareness, a relay that lets the brain process and contextualize before input lands as felt experience. Olfactory signals skip this relay. They reach the amygdala and hippocampus first, structures bound up in emotion and long-term memory formation, before cognition intervenes. This anatomical route underlies what we call the Proustian phenomenon. A smell can return you to a specific afternoon thirty years ago with a bodily immediacy no photograph approaches, because the pathway bypasses the processing that makes experience feel mediated.
Here is where the empathy machine question lies. Scent induces felt states directly, arriving as somatic event. When you encounter a smell, you take in a physical fact, a direct action on your nervous system, before interpretation can compose a response. That places it within aesthetics in the original sense, within aesthesis, the body’s capacity to be affected. So what does an artist do with a medium that reaches the body this directly, and reaches it without ever asking you to stand in someone else’s place?
In 2014, artist Brian Goeltzenleuchter conceived a project called Scents of Exile as a proposal for an exhibition of the same name, curated by Ashraf Osman. The exhibition never came together, and the concept waited for close to five years. In 2019, during a residency at Sculpture Space in Utica, New York, Goeltzenleuchter revived it. Working with administrators at the Mohawk Valley Resource Center for Refugees, he developed the project’s first two scent profiles: Keyro, twenty-two years old, whose memories of Egypt gathered around the Arab Spring protests (sweat, smoke, tear gas), and Azira, fifty-two, whose memories centered on the smell of boiled milk. When lockdown arrived months later, Goeltzenleuchter kept building the archive remotely, conducting Zoom interviews with dozens of participants over three months.
Each Scents of Exile station includes a hand sanitizer dispenser. The scented solution, perfume-grade materials blended into a conventional sanitizing formula, meets WHO standards for alcohol content. It functions as hand sanitizer. A relief-printed poster beside each dispenser carries the interview subject’s biography and scent memories in their own words. When a visitor sanitizes, the fragrance transfers to their skin. They carry it when they leave.
The hand sanitizer dispenser rewards attention as an object. Its cultural function, made especially legible since 2020, centers on removal and hygienic erasure, the anesthetic in its most everyday register, engineered to make surfaces odorless. Goeltzenleuchter reverses this logic entirely. The thing designed to strip sensation becomes the vehicle for intimate transmission. The anesthetic becomes the aesthetic carrier.
What lifts Scents of Exile above clever conceptual inversion is the chain of authorship at its center. Keyro and Azira and Qasim named their own memories. They chose what to transmit. The artist translated their descriptions into composed fragrances, and the visitor receives them. This structure parts ways with the first-person framework VR employs. The viewer of Clouds Over Sidra occupies Sidra’s perspective while Sidra’s own agency in the rendering disappears. In Scents of Exile, transmission originates with the person whose experience is at stake. The scent that travels on the visitor’s skin after they leave belongs, in some meaningful sense, to Keyro. By touching the dispenser, the visitor agrees to carry it.
This shows what genuine aesthesis in aesthetic practice can look like: the body opened toward an experience originating elsewhere, offered by someone who chose to share it.
The anaesthetic Buck-Morss describes is a problem of transmission, of what a finished work does to the nervous system of someone who meets it. It says nothing about how the work came to exist. A practice runs on failed batches, on formulas mixed just to keep a hand in on a tired week, on commercial commissions that quietly fund the conceptual ones, and none of that reaches a stranger or answers to this standard. Anti-aesthetic experiment is often the most fruitful ground a practice has, and there are stretches where making anything at all is what keeps the practice alive. The demand arrives later, at the moment of address, when you set something in front of another person and ask them to receive it.
So the responsibility lands narrowly, and it lands there. Work in olfaction runs across a wide range of intentions. Some of it serves a commodity, some a conceptual investigation, some the plain elicitation of feeling, and these overlap constantly, none of them foreclosing the others. When the aim turns toward aesthesis, though, toward the body’s capacity to be genuinely affected, then feeling becomes the thing the work owes the person who meets it. A scent deployed to produce comfortable association, or to leave the impression of having cared while the nervous system stays undisturbed, operates in the anaesthetic register. The aesthetic surface holds, and aesthesis stays foreclosed underneath it.
The medium’s directness, arriving before interpretation, before the visitor has arranged a response, is both its opportunity and its demand. A smell makes a claim on the body that other mediums can sidestep. Whether a given work meets that claim, or only aestheticizes the asking, is the question every practitioner eventually sits with, and sits with at the threshold where the work meets someone else.
References
Buck-Morss, Susan. “Aesthetics and Anaesthetics: Walter Benjamin’s Artwork Essay Reconsidered.” October, vol. 62, Autumn 1992, pp. 3–41.
Eagleton, Terry. The Ideology of the Aesthetic. Blackwell, 1990.
Goeltzenleuchter, Brian. “The Origins of Scents of Exile.” Scents of Exile, 11 February 2021.
Groes, Sebastian, and Tom Mercer. “Smell and Memory: The Proust Phenomenon.” The Psychologist, British Psychological Society, January 2024.
Martingano, A. J., Herrera, F., and Konrath, S. “Virtual Reality Improves Emotional but Not Cognitive Empathy: A Meta-Analysis.” Technology, Mind, and Behavior, 2021.
Milk, Chris. “How Virtual Reality Can Create the Ultimate Empathy Machine.” TED2015, March 2015.
Olfactory Art Keller. “Scents of Exile.” Exhibition page, 2021.
Sora-Domenjó, Cristina. “Disrupting the ‘Empathy Machine’: The Power and Perils of Virtual Reality in Addressing Social Issues.” Frontiers in Psychology, 2022.