Yanxi Feng

C06

How can we archive memory through the senses?

C06 is a portable scent capture device that collects the molecular composition of an environment and preserves it inside a sealed glass jar. To re-experience the captured scent, the user simply opens the jar and relive the memory.

The project investigates scent as a recordable medium for personal memory. Today, we preserve meaningful experiences primarily through photographs, video, and audio. Smell remains absent from this archive, despite being the most direct sensory pathway to the brain regions responsible for memory and emotion. C06 addresses this absence by translating research on volatile organic compound adsorption and odor evoked memory into a working object.

For our first captures, we chose two scents that speak to each other across time: forest, and campfire. Both are wood. One is wood standing alive among other living things. The other is wood transformed by human hands into warmth, shelter, and the act of survival. Held together in two glass jars, they form a quiet dialogue between nature as it exists and nature as we use it. They mark the threshold where the human world begins, and ask what we leave behind, and what we carry with us, when we cross it.

Project done in collaboration with Erin Xi MA 26 DE.

CO6

A scent capture machine.