University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign

Smellscaping Guiyu

Zhou, Tinghao

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MediaNV19I1_Zhou.pdf

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https://hdl.handle.net/2142/117918

Description

Title
Smellscaping Guiyu
Author(s)
Zhou, Tinghao
Issue Date
2023-02
Keyword(s)
  • E-waste Pollution
  • Global Media Economy
  • Sensory Politics
  • Emergent Experience
  • Olfactory Ethnography
Date of Ingest
2023-05-15T14:24:05-05:00
Abstract
Once the largest e-waste recycling and processing town in the world, Guiyu, China, was characterized by a pungent, penetrating smell of burning chemicals and plastics, commonly referred to as Guiyu Wei by both locals and officials. Shrouded in the environmental terror of unidentified toxins and chemicals, breathing had become a precarious bodily (re)action that constantly put people’s lives at risk. Taking Guiyu as its center case, this essay documents two “smell walks” in Guiyu conducted by the local community and me, respectively. It presents a prolonged material afterlife of data that is intimately intertwined with the life and livelihood of the local workforce and community and tracks the production of desensitized subjects. How do we represent a particular kind of smell or a specific form of olfactory experience? How can we communicate this message with a larger public that has little knowledge of what life is like within a chemically polluted environment? This project seeks to think about these questions in artistic terms, conceiving research-creation as an integral methodology. Through the Guiyu-inspired art series, “Synesthesia (unfinished),” I explore various possibilities of olfactory representation and the emergent relationships among smell, the environment, and our sensorium. As the centerpiece of this project, I envision “Smellscaping Guiyu” as an immersive installation that takes visitors beyond their intimate sensory knowledge and immerses them in the unfamiliar olfactory milieu fabricated by chemicals and elements from Guiyu, one of the “shadow places” at the corner of the world.
Series/Report Name or Number
Media-N, vol. 19, issue 1
Type of Resource
text
Genre of Resource
other
Language
eng
DOI
https://doi.org/10.21900/j.median.v19i1.943
Copyright and License Information
  • Copyright 2023 Tinghao Zhou
  • This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/).

Owning Collections

Media-N V19.1 2023: Afterlives of Data PRIMARY
Volume 19 Issue 1