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Paper short abstract

This paper examines how aroma generation platforms translate smell and taste into molecular correlations that travel across local and global regulations, and analyzes the emerging chemical–aesthetic–legal complex that stabilizes these percepts, outlining how this can be studied ethnographically.

Paper long abstract

Recent developments in the aroma industry center on AI-based platforms that promise to reinvent known smells and tastes through ingredients that comply with expanding health and environmental regulations. Instead of treating smell and taste as relational and embodied emergences, these systems render aromas as standardized percepts that can be recomposed across changing regulatory contexts and ingredient restrictions.

Drawing on the case of an olfactory and gustatory AI developed by the US-based company Osmo, I identify and analyze three main dimensions in the new AI-driven aroma industry. First, smell and taste are treated as stable objects and rendered objective within these platforms, making them recomposable across local regulations and restrictions. Second, such systems depend on extensive sensory labor and classificatory work to develop aroma taxonomies and evaluation protocols that translate lived sensory encounters into standardized data. Third, these taxonomies and protocols are used to map correlations between sensory descriptions and molecular structure, inscribing percepts into new technical and regulatory domains. Through these developments, I reveal a set of chemo-sensory infrastructures and practices in an emerging chemical-aesthetic-legal complex, in which molecules and regulatory constraints reorganize each other.

Lastly, I outline ethnographic possibilities for studying and intervening in the infrastructures and practices of this chemical-aesthetic-legal complex, showing how attention to their capacity to produce new materialities can accompany efforts to destabilize the invention of stable percepts.