For her masters degree at London’s Central Saint Martins College of Arts and Design, artist Amy Radcliffe invented a camera that records scents instead of images. The camera, called a Madeleine — named for a pastry in a Marcel Proust novel that triggers 3,000 pages of childhood memories — allows users to bottle the scents that define their lives.
“Our sense of smell is believed to have a direct link to our emotional memory,” Radcliffe said on her artist’s page for the Madeleine. Science has established that scent can be a potent trigger of memory. Our olfactory bulb, the part of the brain that processes scent, is integrated directly into the brain’s limbic system, associated with memory and emotion.
According to Wired magazine, the Madeleine uses headspace technology “used by scientists and fragrance houses for decades.” A Madeleine user operates the machine by putting the Madeleine’s glass bulb over the subject or the smell environment. An air hose draws the scent into a trap lined with absorbent polymer resin. Radcliffe told Wired that some scents, “like citrus fruit,” can take only minutes to capture, while others, like “a person’s skin,” can take hours.
