What is Your Scent Today?

2018-11-292023-12-12 By Yu-Chuan Tseng Art WorkDigital Art,Jane,Net Art,Net Culture

Artist: Yu-Chuan Tseng, Hao-Chiang Lin

Year: 2018
Program by Sheng-Po Shen, Yi-Ching Huang, Chia-Chun Chang
Cooperation with LFP Laboratory of Fragrance

“What is Your Scent Today?” is the piece of the series works “Jane”, the continuation of “Digital Portraits-Jane ” and “Jane’ Diary”, revolves around the theme of smell. In this piece, a discussion of how emotions are evoked from scent is conducted before proceeding to analyze the transformation of scent in a physical space. In the digital era of rapid communication and information flow especially on social media, massive amounts of data which contain many emotional cues are created. These texts on the internet serve as a source for exploring and analyzing human sentiments, which in turn help researchers to better understand the public’s opinions and emotions.

What is Your Scent Today? , , is an analysis of texts of “Jane’ Diary”. The texts are generated from a computer program that will automatically conduct a daily search of the name Jane at a fixed-time, on Twitter. It will collect, edit and recreate the texts into an English diary. The English diary automatically be translated into a Chinese diary through a translation software. Both diaries will be printed out to be displayed.

A diary is a personal record of feelings of the day and expresses one’s private emotions. However, social media has transformed these writings into something that is being displayed and read by the public. Through affective computing, emotions are interpreted and analyzed from daily texts gathered from the twitter accounts; and a scent that corresponds to the mood of the day is created. An emotion may correspond to a romantic scent. However, after the emotions are interpreted by the algorithm and the generated scent is released into the physical space, will it still be a romantic scent? In any case, the scent could become a weapon occupying the space, expanding its quadrant. Just like today’s ubiquitous social media, it becomes a part of our daily life, something that is almost impossible to abandon.

Program plan:

Conduct a daily search through Twitter account and download texts
Based on the emotional dictionary and the fragrance database, the emotional keyword set and the aroma keyword set are trained through supervised machine learning.
Then through the emotional computing classifier, the emotions are divided into six categories: anger, disgust, fear, happiness, sadness, and surprise.
The scent is divided into four categories: FRESH, FLORAL, ORIENTAL, WOODY.
There are 31 bottles of perfume produced according to the emotional and aroma ratio with the assistance of Laboratory of Fragrance and Perfume (LFP).
Repeat for 31 days and create a 30-day scent bottle on Aug. 2019
During the exhibition, the audience is invited to choice and mix the fragrances of Jane to create their scent of today.

〈你今天的味道是？〉是以珍(Jane)為名的系列作品之一，〈珍的肖像〉與〈珍的日記〉之延續，以香味為主題，討論透過程式分析的情緒，轉換成為香味佔領實體空間的存在證實。今天的情緒為何？是〈你今天的味道是？〉想要探索的課題。在社群媒體爆炸性溝通與訊息交流的數位時代中，人們創造出巨量數據，在網路上留下的情緒線索，成為文字探勘與情感分析的資料來源，也成為研究者了解大眾意見與情感的文本與圖像分析的線索，並成為餵養大眾知識與訊息的參考文本。

以〈珍的日記〉為分析文本。文本來自於每日固定時間程式自動搜尋Twitter中，以Jane為名的帳號，並將其文字節錄集結，創造編輯成為一篇英文日記，再以翻譯軟體自動翻譯為中文日記，公開展示。日記是一個人紀錄每日心情感受，抒發情緒的私密，卻在社群媒體中，成為被展示觀看的公開書寫。此集合眾人的文本，再經由情感運算(Affective computing technology)挖掘文字資料中的情緒特質，分析集合眾人的情感情緒，創造出屬於當日情緒的香味。

氣味所象徵的情感是浪漫的，然而當透過程式運算所產生的情緒定義，並進而產生的實體氣味標散於實體空間，是否仍具有魅力？然而無論如何，氣味，成為一種絕對佔領空間，擴張象限的武器，正如今日無所不在的社群媒體一般，成為無法離棄的生活日常。