Most AI-and-photography projects stay in the visual register — generating new images, restoring old ones, extending a frame. The Anemoia Device, built by MIT Media Lab researcher Cyrus Clarke in the Tangible Media research group, goes somewhere else entirely: it turns an analog photograph into a custom fragrance, on the premise that smell reaches memory and emotion more directly than any image can.
How the device is actually built
The Anemoia Device is a physical object arranged in three vertical sections. A user places an analog photograph into the top section. In the middle, an AI-powered computer analyzes the image, while the user shapes the interpretation using three physical dials controlling perspective, time, and mood. At the bottom, a set of pumps connected to fragrance reservoirs produces a custom scent based on that analysis and those dial settings. The whole interaction is closer to operating a piece of analog scientific equipment than using a software tool — which appears to be a deliberate choice, keeping the interface physical and tactile rather than screen-based.
Why the project is named what it’s named
“Anemoia” describes nostalgia for a time you never actually lived through — and that’s the intended effect here, not a side effect. Because the AI is interpreting and translating a photograph rather than reproducing a scent that “belongs” to it in any objective sense, the resulting fragrance is necessarily an invention layered onto a real image. The device is explicit about that: it’s manufacturing a sensory memory that has no ground truth, deliberately.
Why smell was the right sense to build around
Among the human senses, smell has an unusually direct relationship to memory and emotion, capable of summoning mood and atmosphere without requiring any explanation the way an image or a sentence does. That’s the actual research bet underlying the project: that translating visual information into an underused sensory channel produces a more emotionally potent artifact than staying within the visual medium the source material already lives in.
Why this is worth your attention even outside academia
The Anemoia Device is a clean example of a broader, underexplored direction for creative AI work generally — using a generative model as a translator between senses rather than a generator within a single one. Most creative AI tools right now stay inside their source medium: text becomes image, image becomes video. A project that deliberately crosses from image into scent is a useful prompt for anyone whose practice touches AI and physical/sensory material: the interesting territory might not be doing the obvious thing better, but choosing an unexpected sense to translate into at all.