The Smell of Vision. Immersive Media and Multisensoriality

One of the most relevant and disruptive aspects of the environments organized by immersive media consists of multisensoriality. It is not a case that the device historically recognized as the first virtual reality system, Morton Heilig’s Sensorama, was explicitly designed to achieve the agreement of different senses (vision, sound, smell, balance, touch) more than the immersion in a virtual space. The article interrogates the relationship between multisensoriality and immersive media devices from a media-archaeological perspective, focusing on the relationship that media have historically had with a sense that is culturally classified as inferior, such as smell. Indeed, smell is a sensory sphere that seems to resist attempts at mediatization – understood as a process of recording and transmission – precisely because it is linked to the dimension of immediate contact. The main goal of the investigation is to trace the failed, merely imagined, and rarely realized attempts to channel smell into the media experience as a model for the relationship that new technologies have with the senses today. From this perspective, the article will focus on several phenomena, such as 1) the processes of media transcoding of smell into the spheres of sight and hearing; 2) the failed attempts to integrate smell into media experiences (the utopia of the olfactory cinema, from Smell-O-Vision to Odorama); 3) the purely imagined multisensory media (such as the Feelies, the tactile-smelling cinema imagined by Aldous Huxley); 4) The ways in which the new media of Virtual and Mixed Reality address the need for synchronization between smells and images, while new research explores the possibility of digitizing and transmitting smells. Considering these models, which belong to different epistemes and historical horizons, the article investigates the role covered by multisensoriality in general and the canalization of smell in particular in defining the purpose of media experiences, especially the immersive ones.