Anemoia is a neologism, coined by John Koenig in his Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows, a work that coined names for previously unnamed emotions. The term describes nostalgia for times never lived, often evoked through images or movies. Cyrus Clarke he has built a machine that tries to make you live through them.
The Anemoia device is a machine that translates photos into scents using artificial intelligence, using smell as a direct anatomical route to the brain’s memory and emotion centers. Whether it actually delivers a proper feeling or not is debatable, but the project opens a new frontier in synthetic memories.
Anemoia device © Cyrus Clarke
Anemoia device © Cyrus Clarke
Anemoia device © Cyrus Clarke
The entrance photo © Cyrus Clarke
Manual calls © Cyrus Clarke
Creating Perfumes © Cyrus Clarke
The device is part of a larger investigation by Cyrus Clarke at the MIT Media Lab, whose work treats data as a medium for poetic experience, beyond mere utility. Earlier in his projects, he worked on storing information in plant DNA and translating carbon footprints of garden plants. The Anemoia device continues with the same logic: taking something intangible and giving it a physical, sensory form.
The machine works by feeding it an analog photo, as a vision language model reads the image and creates a short narrative. Three physical dials, controlling perspective, time and mood, allow you to shape how this narrative is framed, whose point of view, which era and which emotional record. Call inputs are passed to a large language model (LLM), which produces a prompt. This prompt is then run through a curated knowledge base, mapping narrative and emotional elements to olfactory profiles, and an algorithm selects and blends up to four scents from a library of 44. The result is a scent meant to smell like the synthetic memory of a life you never had, embedded in that photograph.
The choice of using the perfume is effective and scientifically documented. Olfactory signals travel a more direct route to the brain’s limbic system than visual or auditory input, which is why a smell can trigger a memory with a visceral power that a photograph rarely matches. This is also why smell is so often used in immersive artistic experiences or even simply by brands in their stores.
The hardest part is translating narrative mapping into scents, as there is no established vocabulary, which was created by Clarke’s team at MIT and Harvard. The chain of inference is long enough that the final fragrance probably bears little relation to the original image. However, one could argue that this is okay, since memory itself works this way, reconstructive and unreliable. The research paper published by the team positions the device as “an investigation into the malleability of memory in an age of artificial intelligence.”
As AI systems become more capable of creating persuasive sensory and narrative experiences, the ethics of synthetic memory becomes coherent, especially in the larger landscape of technologies that produce emotional responses. THE Anemoia The device is a small, sleek prototype for a much larger and far more alarming set of capabilities.
