Jayanthan Sriram is a member of the German Academic Scholarship Foundation. He is currently enrolled in the Interdisciplinary Humanities PhD Program at Concordia, and serves as the Coordinator of the Exploration in Sensory Design research team. His research focus (and mission) is to promote olfactory aisthesis as aesthethics through the exploration of functional scenting and perfumery. His PhD project “The Life of the Ephemeral – Building Olfactory Aesthethics” (WT) will offer a critique of the general neglect of corporeal  and olfactory values and the disqualification of the aesthetics of smells in everyday life,  by engaging the perspective of the creators and curators of such expressions as well.  

Through his exposure to Media Studies, Philosophy and Theory of Literatures and Cultures during his B.A. and M.A. at the Eberhard-Karls University Tübingen, Jayanthan came to question the view of mind as the unlimited source of all knowledge, and became acutely conscious of the singular restriction of a logocentric shedding of skin in favor of reason. He proposes that the breathing, listening and experiential center of culture is the human body instead, and that logic and language spring from a sensory and phenomenological grounding. Jayanthan’s work tries to express this through engaging with the aesthetic fundament of Baumgarten theory of aesthetics not through Kant but Spinoza and especially Gernot Böhme’s recent theory of atmospheres. In this, the socio-political tinging of our sensory experience should appear on the forefront of aesthetics, not as a theory of art as the pure, disinterested form of artistic expression, but in the words of Böhme himself as “aesthetic labor”. This concept can carry implications of discrimination and exclusion based on sensory experience in all temporal stages of ideology, before, with and after its logocentric expression. Whether it is the labeling of difference in ethnic minorities as inferior by smell and culinary practices in their moral or societal value or the acute distinctions of how a male or female body is supposed to smell, an aesthethics of olfaction tries to capture these movements and intricacies.  

Jayanthan’s focus on the ephemeral stretches beyond olfaction to his writing on art and music. He is an editor for the Stuttgart art magazine Sonnendeck and runs a blog reviewing music. His writing is equally inspired by philosophical theories as it is by cultural expressions or aesthetic labor – interweaving Merleau-Ponty with the music of Thou, the visuals of Jon Rafman or a nose like Alessandro Gualtieri. All expressions prove to create powerful means of consumption and distinction and as such deserve consideration under the lens of a new aesthetic unafraid to employ sensory studies, post-colonial approaches and critical understandings of hegemony and philosophical systematization.  

Follow his writings here: https://transcendnoise.blogspot.com/.