A recent post on the Mindhacks blog reminds me of something I did a little research on a while ago, while reading about Madame Tussaud’s origins during the French revolution. It was about a Dr. Beaurieux, whose notorious experiment in 1905 has made for one of the most interesting anecdotes one can find on Wikipedia—that is if you are bold enough to bring up the entry for Guillotine.

The experiment was this: A condemned prisoner named Henri Languille would try to heed the doctor’s call immediately after his decapitation. What happened is worth relating in full.

Here, then, is what I was able to note immediately after the decapitation: the eyelids and lips of the guillotined man worked in irregularly rhythmic contractions for about five or six seconds. This phenomenon has been remarked by all those finding themselves in the same conditions as myself for observing what happens after the severing of the neck…

I waited for several seconds. The spasmodic movements ceased. [...] It was then that I called in a strong, sharp voice: ‘Languille!’ I saw the eyelids slowly lift up, without any spasmodic contractions – I insist advisedly on this peculiarity – but with an even movement, quite distinct and normal, such as happens in everyday life, with people awakened or torn from their thoughts.

Next Languille’s eyes very definitely fixed themselves on mine and the pupils focused themselves. I was not, then, dealing with the sort of vague dull look without any expression, that can be observed any day in dying people to whom one speaks: I was dealing with undeniably living eyes which were looking at me. After several seconds, the eyelids closed again[...].

Beauieux was following the estimation of a Dr. Dassy D’Esstaing, who in 1883 determined that the head retains some form of consciousness for a minute and a half after it has been removed from the body. The author Robert Olen Butler used this notion—plus the idea that in a moment of panic humans tend to speak at a rate of 160 words—to write his short story collection Severance, in which the thoughts of his decapitated characters, some famous (John the Baptist, Cicero, Medusa) and some not (a systems analyst in the World Trade Center), sputter out on the page in the last few moments of thought.

It’s a beautiful concept, beautifully…ahem, executed. The truncated text is available on Google books. I’ll leave you with the thoughts of Medusa.

Photo: From Wikipedia, moments before the Languille Experiment.

A few months ago, I went to see a man about some origami. Like many paper engineers, he got his start in greeting cards, getting little holiday scenes to stand at attention by scouring straight lines with an X-acto knife. He handed me his business card. There’s a little drawing of an X-acto on it, but most of the work he does now involves a laser cutter that scours halfway through a sheet of paper. I could see the laser’s handiwork when Matt Shilian’s business card popped open like an excited little flower. Everyone around me took one or two or three, and the kids used them like mouths to talk to each other

Shilian scours paper at the University of Michigan, teaching students to create what he calls kinetic sculpture, which might take the form of something useful like a kite, or abstract like these folded sculptures that are rigged with string to grow up like a bed of spiny kelp and then retreat into two dimensions. During his talk at the NYU event “Cabinet of Wonders,” curated by the cabinetmaster himself Lawrence Weschler, Shilian highlighted new technologies that used origami principles: a stent which can be slipped into an artery and then deployed by a balloon cathether and a solar power array based on a fold called Miura-ori, in which a sheet of paper is packed unto a single square that can be pulled at one end to unfold into a large rectangle, and then refolded with minimal effort.   

However, no discussion of scientific origami could be had these days without the mention of it’s guru, the paper engineer Robert Lang, profiled a few years ago by Susan Orlean in the New Yorker. He’s developed algorithms to aid in the creation of an origami-based airbag and a telescope that could be folded and packed onto a space shuttle and expanded to three times it’s size when deployed in space. Lang is also a champion for optagami, in which “rays of light are bent, refracted, focused, and folded through contorted pathways, and ensuring that no bundle of light is inadvertently clipped off can be a nontrivial feat.” That’s right, it isn’t the lens that’s folded, but the path of light itself.

Only half of Lang’s Web site concerns science and technology of origami; Lang is also a master paper folder. You can commission him for the paper swan of your dreams or can get inspired with look through his gallery, which includes this fourteen inch tall barn owl and a five inch stag beetle, all originating from one uncut square of paper. 

The life of an odor artist is, more often than not, an unfulfilled one. At the 1939 World’s Fair in New York, Swiss engineer Hans Laube premiered a short film he described as a smell-o-drama. Over the next thirty five minutes the auditorium filled with thirty two different odors — roses, coconut, tar, hay, peaches. He called the film “Main Traum,” my dream.

Laube soon found himself under the thumb of Hollywood producer Michael Todd Jr, who had considered, but ultimately decided against, the addition of smell to his blockbuster “Around the World in 80 Days.” Now with that film a Best Picture winner, he could finance a pet project with Laube that was all smell: “The Scent of Desire.” The audience found the film both sickly and faint, some overwhelmed by the scent, others snorting loudly for a whiff. It was eventually released in a non-smelling version called “Holiday in Spain.” Odorless, the film didn’t make much sense. When Todd died in 2002, his obituary ran a short note of defeat from the filmmaker. He concluded that the introduction of smell in films was “dubious and dependent upon the noses of the individual viewers and the projectors whims.”

In a dark theatre, or in an open field, can two people ever smell the same. And feel the same about that smell?

The life of an odor artist can be a lonely one. Halfway through “Harold and Maude,” the funereal Harold is given a house tour by the ethereal Maude. She leads him to what looks like a large wind-up music box and hands him a mask, the kind for administering ether. These are my oderifics, she announces, “Give the nose a treat, a sort of olfactory bandwidth.” Harold is administered her favorite, snow on 42^nd street, and they begin a slow joining of two noses. “Subways…perfume… cigarettes…” There’s a pleading look on Maude’s face, as he creeps closer and closer to that smell she knows so innately: “Snow on 42nd street.” Her little face scrunches up in ecstasy. It goes on and on, she says, removing the mask from his face..

Smell is the traveling scent. As advertised it can transport us from a kitchen to and island, from a hotel to a forest, from a laboratory to a subway car, or at least, we expect it to. It’s also the journey not taken, the sickening promise of getting away from it all, going home. It’s fake, it’s pathetic, it angers us, it makes us ill, it closes in on us, A little finger creeps our nose and wiggles about annoyingly. I’m taking you there, it wiggles, we’re going there together.

I had thought the limited success of odor artists had meant that people had for the most part given up on odor art. So I was surprised to hear about this month’s premiere of Green Aria at the Guggenheim, a perfume concert conceived by chemist Christophe Laudameil, who collaborated with composers Nico Muhly and Valgeir Sigurdsson to turn what might have been a tasting menu of smells into a hyper-sensory experience, an opera which incorporated notes of sound and scent. These twenty-first-century odor artists were confronted with the same challenges as their predecessors: how to ventilate and manage the smells? In the past, theaters had used a series of fans and air conditioning vents to blow the scent in, but the real test of the system was getting the scent out: “Matthew and Laudameil worked with Fläkt Woods, a ventilation company, to design and manufacture a ‘scent organ.’ From the centralized organ, the scents travel to each individual auditorium seat. The seats were then rigged with a thin, flexible ‘scent microphone’ that an audience member could position as close to, or as far from, their nose as they pleased.”

And the audience, for the most part, loved it. Is it because the opera played in a museum and not a movie theatre or variety hall? Is it because the scents and the music had truly combined? Or is it because our senses are already so overloaded that to only ask two of them to do the work was a relative breeze?

An Opera For Your Nose [The New Scientist]

Music Review: Green Aria [NYT]

The Lingering Reek of Smell-O-Vision [ LAT]