#but just a realisation that the way ppl interact with content online in the last few years has become so concerning

[jalboyhenthusiast]

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[sneakystorms]

When i think about the messed up ways people treat sharing art online i always end up thinking about thank yous. Like when a youtuber takes the time to thank their audience, not for financial support or even for sharing the video with friends but just "my last video got more views than any previous, thank you guys so much" and so on like...

I KNOW it's so minor and most of the time it probably comes down to courtesy and ingrained social ritual but in the context of the insanely toxic mindset yt and other content sharing platforms encourage in their creatives... The idea that watching your video is a FAVOUR or service that I'm doing you out of kindness rather than something i watched for the selfish purpose of enjoying it..... It doesn't sit well with me....

And i do realise that especially on a small scale communities are way more pleasant to be in if there is a level of "I'll give this person's work the time of the day because i want them to feel good" type mentality. But content sharing platforms usually encourage chasing interaction for its own sake and once you get into that mindset if you're thinking about it in terms of "more interaction = people being nice to me / less interaction= people being mean to me" you're just gonna have such a bad time. And really it morphs into a kind of entitlement where artists feel wronged if a piece of theirs doesn't "do well".

Idk i guess i recognise the value of ppl taking a bit of responsibility for the happiness of others in their community or even that of total strangers but still i just hate it when things that are supposed to be done for your own fun are turned into things you do for other people to make them feel better. The flipside of this btw (as in another thing which is super minor and probably has more to do with preexisting rules of courtesy than anything specific about social media but which is still indicative of an unhealthy way to view making and sharing and consuming art) is when artists feel the need to apologise for not sharing enough content for whatever reason. As if they're obligated to do so for their audience's sake

[vrcomputart]

12.11.18

ASMR RESEARCH FOR GROUP PROJECT

Now You’ve Got the Shiveries: Affect, Intimacy, and the ASMR Whisper Community by Joceline Andersen 11/11/14

https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/1527476414556184

ASMR - intention, affect

-          This paper “examine[s] how ASMR videos create pleasure through a distant intimacy that relies on the heteronormative gender roles of care and the aural impression of the whisper for its implementation and how their shared space on YouTube further defines that intimacy as public and communal”

-          The ASMR community creates and exchanges videos designed to trigger tingles through screens, denying its nonnormative intimate nature and “the transgressiveness of their digital pleasure”

-          Relaxing head tingles helps with stress and insomnia, inducing comfort and bliss

-          “In the case of ASMR, affect and emotion exist hand in hand, tethered by intentionality, memory, and nostalgia. In this paper, I will explore the connotations of intimacy and care that create the affective ASMR experience to examine the ASMR community on YouTube as sharing in a public and therefore nonnormative experience of distant intimacy that reflects, if reluctantly, the potential of digital communities to make us feel”

-          Aural triggers eg whispering, rustling paper, tapping are physiologically charged - an affective experience (Massumi)

-          “the intention of care has a role in the way that these experiences manifest an affective experience with a content of pleasure.” Some videos role-play everyday tasks, including sounds we may find annoying in our day-to-day lives, but the intention the viewer brings in (to relax) and the assumed intention of the creator (to help others relax) changes the experience to that of care

-          Founder of ASMR research called it “a more polite term for ‘orgasm’. Tenuous links between sensation and science – it is claimed to be an autonomous response, but is ultimately fringe science similar to binaural beat listeners, which brings us back to the point about intentionality. Perhaps it is more of a placebo, and more about the community formed?

Community and Youtube

-          ASMR is a public phenomemon, as it spread across all social media and not just niche sites: “The ASMR community is aligned not only by their quest for affective experience but by their desire to share it through online media…” 

-          Youtube is a big part of the community’s formation -  “youtube is the most public home of asmr”, “an archive and a site of creative exchange”

The voice

-          Usually delivered by female creators. Role-played performance rather than cold instructions. 

-          Voice is important – videos often only show certain body parts (hands, mouth). Focus directed to actions and gesures. Close-ups jar familiar conventions of how a person is framed on a screen. Meditative attention on body parts, sometimes to the point of abstraction. 

-          Sound over video: binaural recording is getting more popular;  “increasingly sophisticated audioscapes while the video quality remains poor. The video component is secondary to the experience and exists primarily because of the affordances of YouTube”

-          Whisper as powerful in a hypersonic world. The whisper requires a closeness between speaker and listener for communication. Connotations to intimate relationships like mother and child (or conversations you have at sleepovers with friends). “The whisper recreates intimacy without the need for physical presence”

-          Whisper demands more attention, so the listener is more intent on sounds, and considering most people use headphones, the effect of whispers in one’s ear are more intense. Private and intimate exchange despite it being public.

-          Quality of voice as carrier of meaning, rather than the words themselves. 

-          The whisperer is ‘hyper-present’, creating an intimacy, a presence made possible thru binaural mics and immersive headphone sound. Affect involves impressions, impression implies contact. Movement creates emotional content. 2 bodies are connected, are able to impress upon another.

Impression and non-normative intimacy

-          Impression created thru affect at a distance is crucially aural. Body casts its impression thru voice. Voice implies flesh body. Listening as act of touch (sound waves). Thus impressions are created through the voice and video (though video is not as affective as we’ve discussed above)

-          Affective impression at a distance – distant intimacy. Close personal attention is a trigger that suggests physical proximity, but is remotely evoked through video. And distant not only spacially but temporally too – you can watch a video a year later after it was released.

Distant intimacy can be useful for people who maybe experience social anxiety or cannot physically experience intimacy. Maybe it’s good cause it’s controlled (you choose when to watch, can pause if needed). And from the other side, you make one video and can touch many. Like an artwork, an encounter, a ‘disruptive’ force in a way.

Also interesting considering the emphasis placed on romantic, sexual relationships as the main, most valid source of intimacy and care. What about friendships and other platonic relationships? And what about a collective sense of care i.e. you don’t need to know someone personally to care about them

-          Distant intimacy – experienced as a group in absence of normal definitions of physical proximity make it “nonstandard intimacy”

-          Intimate experiences in heteronormative culture are limited to couples in private. So you can’t experience pleasure with strangers, especially sexual pleasure. ASMR falls into a zone  where “the spillage of eroticism into everyday social life seems transgressive in a way that provokes normal aversion”

-          ASMR pleasure ranges from relaxation to eroticism. A lot of creators claim it is non-sexual. The affective charge of ASMR emerges w/o standard ‘closeness’ (not in romantic couple context, not physically close in proximity) – so it is reluctantly placed in nonstandard intimacy.

-          Even though it is non-normative, creators still rely on normative scenarios of intimacy to provide emotional content behind the affective charge. Intimate care is provided by females. There is often a child-mother relationship being built between viewer and creator. Even when men make these videos, they participate in tasks gendered as female.

But female creators are choosing to do this – some empowerment? Do they get paid?

Summary: digital and physical

-          Tho enabled thru tech, ASMR still relies on attention to the body and its sensations. Exists thru video streaming platforms, low tech, is sensual thru reclaiming care paradigms of personal attention, touch and meditation thru distant intimacy. In sci-fi, digital pleasure enabled thru computers – films that imagine pleasure as a drug that hooks the brain to a computer, “a cyborg high”. Asmr stands between – addiction is not only pleasure but intimacy, relationship is not only distant but anonymous.

-          Ideal cyborg – uses computer to reinstate the body in shared experiences, rather than leaving out the body purely for mental digital experience. ASMR follows this dictum to the letter, uniting a group of people who use the archive provided by the Internet to focus intensely on a sensation triggered by the impression of a body transmitted through the ear in a nonnormative public experience of pleasure and distant intimacy.

-          Asmr relies on the intimacy and care. Relaxation carried through emotional content, not just the sounds. Asmr uses tech to create new access to pleasure. “the ASMR community allows us to examine what intimacy will look like as we are increasingly linked to each other through the Internet rather than in person.”

-          Distant intimacy breaks with heteronormative culture, releasing a digital-enabled intimacy that is a queer intimacy. While ASMR videos as shared on YouTube draw on real-world paradigms of care, the attachments that ASMRers have to videos beyond their sensory power helps us as media scholars to envision a future where these queer experiences of computer-enabled intimacy are as emotionally compelling as those of maternal care, personal touch, or sex. Whatever the affect created, it is clear that distant intimacy carries emotional value, and that these sensations can be released, by strangers and acquaintances, remotely through digital networks.

There are more noteworthy things to discuss, but I’ll end the notes here as there is already more than enough to digest.

Ideas

Create art that lies between ASMR, oddly satisfying videos (another topic I researched that felt close to ASMR), trance/visionary art aesthetic, music video, and modern witchcraft – providing vids that can be of service, as a form of queer care (nonstandard intimacy). Because for me, behind art, is a desire to relieve suffering through providing pleasure, a desire to care for the world and its creatures, to disrupt the status quo.

Maybe create a device or a platform/software to share the videos in their own context?