Abstract

This paper documents a research-creation project exploring the olfactory dimensions of the public perceptions of air pollution, via a case study of the public and media response in Montreal’s Plateau-Mile End neighbourhood, to wood smoke, and subsequent municipal legislation against wood-burning. It employs the concept of ‘nuisance’ through the creation of an augmented reality media game and other methods to explore the perceptual tensions between annoyance and injury, sensory and physical harm, and the power dynamics that render harms publicly legible or not within larger ‘regimes of perceptibility.’ Within this, the thesis explores how perceived environmental threats to bodily integrity can coalesce a ‘visceral public’, and specifically how odour impacts how such threats are perceived and responded to. The visceral response is contextualised within histories of smoke, smell and public health, studies of public risk perception of air pollution, and the implications of slow violence and uneven geographic distribution of harm from air pollution. Using the Situational Analysis-informed methodology of analytic abduction, the research-creation methods were messy mapping and smellwalking, all of which informed the creation of the interactive augmented reality web game, Nuisances. Through Nuisances, the olfactory ‘techniques of power’ that uphold permission to pollute are identified as Disgust, Diffusion and Differentiation. The game seeks to address these techniques by proposing to offer a the public an alternative mode of perceiving pollution, one that withdraws permission to pollute. Employing the concept of ‘attuned sensing’ in an augmented game experience, Nuisances encourages players to attune to both the sensory dimensions of smell and the broader situation to counter the techniques of power, and produce its own counter-regime of perception.