Creativity of human and non-human matter interwoven: autonomous sensory meridian response videos in a posthuman perspective

The problematization of the idea of creativity resulting in the revision of concepts about autonomous, creative, and human self has been a reality since the end of modernism, or maybe even longer. Postmodernism, as well as theories of posthumanism and new materialism, dealing with categories such as materiality, virtual reality, transgression, hybridization, etc., offer some reflections on the idea of non-human creativity, which is no longer an attribute immanently assigned to human, but a result of interaction between human and non-human elements, including the affective friction of bodies made of matter. Mostly inspired by the theories and methodologies of posthuman studies, studies in new materialism, and new media studies, the article aims to answer the question about the types of creativity appearing in a new YouTube phenomenon – autonomous sensory meridian response videos massively published in recent years. The article is an attempt to give a comprehensive account of the idea of posthuman creativity – with its sub-types like sensual creativity or techno-creativity – visible in extremely popular, however under-researched, autonomous sensory meridian response artworks. The paper puts forward the thesis about autonomous sensory meridian response being a model artistic phenomenon in which the entanglement of human and non-human matter results in a form of posthuman creativity. Numerous examples of autonomous sensory meridian response videos have been analysed, pointing to the specific modes of creative collaboration of human and non-human elements on the film set. In conclusion, it has been shown that autonomous sensory meridian response artworks become the product of posthuman creativity resulting from mutual, affective interaction of bodies. Article in English. Žmogiškos ir nežmogiškos materijos sampynos kūrybiškumas: autonominio jutimo meridiano atsakui skirti vaizdo įrašai posthumanizmo perspektyvoje Santrauka Kūrybiškumo idėjos problematizavimas lėmė tai, kad buvo iš naujo apsvarstytos koncepcijos, susijusios su savarankiška, kūrybiška ir žmogiška savastimi – tai tapo realybe baigiantis modernizmui ar net ir anksčiau. Postmodernizmas, kaip ir posthumanizmo bei naujojo materializmo teorijos, operuojančios tokiomis kategorijomis, kaip materialumas, virtualioji realybė, transgresija, hibridizacija ir kt., kelia tam tikrų apmąstymų dėl nežmogiško kūrybiškumo, kuris jau nebėra savybė, vidujai priskiriama žmogui, idėjos. Tai žmogiškų ir nežmogiškų elementų sąveikos rezultatas, apimantis emocinę materinių kūnų trintį. Straipsnyje, iš esmės paskatintame posthumanizmo, naujojo materializmo ir naujųjų medijų studijose plėtojamų teorijų ir metodologijų, siekiama atsakyti į klausimą, susijusį su kūrybiškumo rūšimis, kylančiomis naujojo YouTube reiškinio kontekste – su autonominio jutimo meridiano atsakui skirtais vaizdo įrašais, plačiai skelbiamais pastaraisiais metais. Šis straipsnis – tai pastangos išsamiai aprašyti posthumanistinio kūrybiškumo idėją, jam būdingus potipius, tokius kaip juslinis ar techninis kūrybiškumas, regimas ypač populiariuose, tačiau mažai tyrinėtuose autonominio jutimo meridiano atsakui skirtuose meno kūriniuose. Straipsnyje pateikiama tezė, esą autonominio jutimo meridiano atsakas – tai pavyzdinis meno reiškinys, kuriame žmogiškos ir nežmogiškos materijos sampyna sukuria posthumanistinio kūrybiškumo formą. Buvo išanalizuota daugybė autonominio jutimo meridiano atsakui skirtų vaizdo įrašų, kuriuose pabrėžiamas specifinis kūrybinės žmogiškų ir nežmogiškų elementų sąveikos pobūdis. Daromos išvados, kad su autonominio jutimo meridiano atsaku susiję meno kūriniai tapo posthumanistinio kūrybiškumo produktu, kurio pagrindas yra abipusė emocinė kūnų sąveika. Reikšminiai žodžiai: autonominio jutimo meridiano atsakas, naujasis materializmas, naujųjų medijų studijos, posthumanistinis kūrybiškumas, posthumanizmas, techninis kūrybiškumas, YouTube

The effects of Autonomous Sensory Meridian Response (ASMR) videos and ASMR group on state anxiety

The aim of this study is to investigate the effects of Autonomous Sensory Meridian Response (ASMR) videos and ASMR group on state anxiety, 212 Malaysians with no history of anxiety disorders were asked to watch both ASMR and non-ASMR videos. State anxiety levels were recorded immediately after watching each video. The participants were then characterised into either ASMR and non-ASMR group based on their responses on a grouping statement. Supplementary data analyses on participants’ subjective ASMR experiences and triggers were also explored. Results showed that non-ASMR group had higher state anxiety after watching the ASMR video, but no significant differences were found in the ASMR group. The findings contradict the hypotheses that ASMR group would have lower state anxiety after watching ASMR video. This suggests that a different form of atypical sensory phenomenon may be elicited in part of ASMR

"This FEELS SO REAL!" Sense and sexuality in ASMR videos

This paper explores the intimate performances in “personal attention” ASMR YouTube videos. ASMR — which stands for Autonomous Sensory Meridian Response — is a term coined by the community of Internet users who experience a particular tingling sensation in response to certain auditory, visual, or haptic stimuli. The sensation often originates in the scalp and travels down the spine and is reported to be immensely pleasurable, as well as relaxing. “ASMRtists” now flood YouTube with a steady stream of high definition videos designed to trigger this sensation for viewer-listeners, often through role-play scenarios that incorporate genre-specific techniques to simulate a personalized, intimate, and sensual encounter with the ASMRtist. This essay draws on affect and performance studies to conduct an analysis of these YouTube videos — using specific examples from the ASMRtist Olivia Kissper as case studies — in order to explore how media infrastructures produce the incarnation of sexuality through the process of mediated intimacy. Ultimately, it works towards a radical redefinition of sexuality that is more centered on affect than on bodily gestures, and suggests that through this lens the consumption of ASMR videos can be seen as a sexual practice and the configuration of ASMRtist, viewer-listener, and digital technology can be seen as a sexual relation

‘The game becomes the mediator of all your relationships’: Life Narrative and Networked Intimacy in Nina Freeman’s Cibele

Nina Freeman’s 2015 videogame Cibele recounts its creator’s experience of falling in love with a fellow player of an online game. An interactive autobiography about a young woman sharing her life online, Cibele explores the terms on which new media enable users to narrate their experiences, represent themselves and forge identities. This article locates the game in relation to recent developments in life writing and independent game design, asking what digital technologies offer autobiographers as medium and as subject matter. It also frames Cibele as an attempt to challenge two dominant discourses about online culture: offering a counterpoint to narratives stressing the dangers facing young women who seek intimacy on the internet, Cibele also questions framings of networked intimacy as a necessarily deficient substitute for “the real thing.” Its oblique approach, however, in tandem with its commitment to witnessing the ambivalences and incoherencies of digital culture, have, I argue, led to these points being missed or misinterpreted by players, reflecting a longstanding tendency to dismiss and devalue women’s life writing

‘ASMR’ autobiographies and the (life-)writing of digital subjectivity

For years now, a growing online subculture has been exchanging videos designed to induce ‘autonomous sensory meridian response’ (ASMR), a mysterious, blissfully relaxing tingling sensation held to alleviate anxiety, pain, insomnia and depression. Emerging from online health forums, ASMR culture today centres on YouTube, where ‘ASMRtists’ have used the feedback mechanisms built into social media platforms to refine a repertoire of ‘trigger’ techniques. Exemplifying a wider trend for using ‘ambient media’ as mood modulators and task facilitators (Roquet, 2016 Ambient Media: Japanese Atmospheres of Self. London: University of Minnesota Press.), ASMR culture’s use of the word ‘trigger’ is telling, gesturing towards what Halberstam ((2014) You Are Triggering Me! The Neo-Liberal Rhetoric of Harm, Danger and Trauma. Bully Bloggers. Available at: https://bullybloggers.wordpress.com/2014/07/05/you-are-triggering-me-the-neo-liberal-rhetoric-of-harm-danger-and-trauma/ (accessed 8 August 2018)) sees as a shift away from the Freudian notion of ‘memory as a palimpsest’ towards one of memory as ‘a live wire sitting in the psyche waiting for a spark’, whereby digital subjects become black-boxed nodes in a cybernetic circuit. This shift has serious implications for the humanities and is particularly resonant for scholars of life-writing. As McNeill ((2012) There is no “I” in network: Social networks sites and posthuman auto/biography. Biography 35(1): 65–82.) argues, digital technologies ‘complicate[] definitions of the self and its boundaries, both dismantling and sustaining the humanist subject in practices of personal narrative’ (p. 65). The resulting friction is highlighted in ‘ASMR autobiographies’: texts narrating the author’s experiences of ASMR and their discovery of online ASMR communities. Echoing familiar auto/biographical forms, from medical case histories and coming out narratives to tales of religious conversion, these texts show that the models of subjectivity we have inherited from Enlightenment philosophy, religion, psychology and Romantic literature retain some cultural purchase. But they also suggest digital media are fostering new understandings of personhood informed by cybernetics, evolutionary psychology, behaviourism and neuroscience. Focusing on works by Andrew MacMuiris, Andrea Seigel and Jon Kersey while also addressing a range of other texts, this article asks what ASMR autobiographies can tell us about digital subjectivity

The pleasure in a whisper. Sound affections of the body

En este trabajo propongo un marco antropológico de análisis de los vínculos socioculturales entre placer y susurro. Para ello, me centro en la práctica cultural de escucha de vídeos online llamados ASMR (Autonomous Sensory Meridian Response) como sensibilidad asistida cuyo fin es obtener sensaciones placenteras a través de susurros y otras sonoridades leves. Aunque el placer en el susurro remite a una experiencia individual, la atención a las distintas prácticas sensoriales y sensuales basadas en el susurro nos desvelan las implicaciones de las sonoridades en el sensorium cultural contemporáneo, sus mediaciones tecnológicas y cómo estas modulan identidades, relaciones y política. El análisis fenomenológico, sensorial y vocal de las prácticas sociales a través de esta sonoridad nos da cuenta del placer como disposición sensorial donde intimidad y memoria se manifiestan como afectos sonoros y procesos vibratorios situados.In this paper I propose an anthropological framework for the analysis of sociocultural bounds between pleasure and whispering. To do so, I focus on the cultural practice of listening to online videos called ASMR (Autonomous Sensory Meridian Response) as an assisted sensibility that aims to elicit pleasurable sensations through whispering and other light sounds. Although the pleasure in whispering refers to an individual experience, the attention to different sensory and sensual practices based on whispering reveals the implications of sonorities in contemporary cultural sensorium, their technological mediations and how they modulate identities, relationships and politics. The phenomenological, sensorial and vocal analysis of social practices through this sonority gives us an account of pleasure as a sensorial disposition where intimacy and memory manifest themselves as sonorous affects and situated vibratory processes

Kuiskauksia, roolileikkiä ja digitaalista kosketusta: Kuvaileva kirjallisuuskatsaus YouTuben ASMR-ilmiöstä

Tämä tutkielma tarkastelee YouTube-alustalla julkaistua ASMR-mediaa mediatutkimuksen näkökulmasta. Tutkimusmenetelmänä on kuvaileva kirjallisuuskatsaus. Menetelmä sallii eri tieteenalojen tutkimusten sisällyttämisen tutkimusaineistoon. Tämä on ASMR-mediaa tutkittaessa tarpeen, sillä kyseessä on vielä niin rajallisesti tutkittu ilmiö, ettei sitä käsittelevää tutkimusta vielä löydy riittävästi pelkän mediatutkimuksen puolelta. Analysoitava aineisto koostuu seitsemästä vertaisarvioidusta tutkimusartikkelista, jotka on julkaistu aikavälillä 2017-2022 mediatutkimuksen, kulttuurintutkimuksen ja viestinnän vertaisarvioiduissa julkaisukanavissa. Analyysissä tutkimustulokset käydään läpi teemoittain. Tutkimusaineiston analyysin perusteella ASMR-mediaa ja sen kuluttamista on mahdollista käsitteellistää seksuaalisena toimintana, sukupuolten performanssina ja leikkinä. Nämä tulkinnat eivät ole keskenään ristiriidassa, vaan tuovat vain ASMR-median eri puolia esiin. Lisäksi ASMR-medialle on merkittävää sen affektiivisuus ja sen edustama mediavälitteinen läheisyys. Mediavälitteiseen läheisyyteen kuuluvat parasosiaalinen ja parahaptinen vuorovaikutus, joissa median katsoja-kuuntelijalle syntyy illuusio hänen ja mediahenkilön välisestä vuorovaikutuksesta. Yksi ASMR-median merkittävistä ominaisuuksista on sen kyky luoda kosketuksen illuusio mediavälitteisen äänen ja kuvan avulla, mikä tekee siitä mediana audiovisuaalisuusen lisäksi haptista. Pohdinnassa tuodaan esiin ASMR-median potentiaalia sosiaalisten ja yhteiskunnallisten rajojen rikkojana niin seksuaalisuuden, sukupuoliroolien kuin myös (aikuisten) leikin kautta ja ehdotetaan näkökulmia tulevaisuuden ASMR-tutkimukselle

Digital Intimacy in ASMR Role-Play Videos

ASMR has grown into a popular genre of online videos where creators use stimuli such as whispering and tapping to induce relaxation and the tingling ASMR sensation. As many ASMR video viewers and researchers have noted, intimacy is a core component of the experience of these videos. This thesis examines how ASMR content creators create an embodied form of affective intimacy in their ASMR &lsquo;role-play&rsquo; videos for viewers to experience. Bringing together the linguistic anthropological framework of intimacy pioneered by Perrino &amp; Pritzker (2018) and the interactional framework developed by Gottman &amp; Driver (2005), this study examines how ASMRtists use bids for intimacy and embodied language as conversational units of intimacy through the format of a mock conversation. In these single-speaker conversations, the ASMRtist implies the viewer&rsquo;s conversational contributions through discourse strategies that include response-pressuring turn design, backchanneling, and repetition of utterances imagined to be made by the interlocutor, thus creating an affective intimate conversation and experience for viewers.</p

Touch Screen Theory

Technology companies claim to connect people through touchscreens, but by conflating physical contact with emotional sentiments, they displace the constructed aspects of devices and women and other oppressed individuals' critiques of how such technologies function. Technology companies and device designers correlate touchscreens and online sites with physical contact and emotional sentiments, promising unmediated experiences in which the screen falls away in favor of visceral materiality and connections. While touchscreens are key elements of most people's everyday lives, critical frameworks for understanding the embodied experiences of using them are wanting. In Touch Screen Theory, Michele White focuses on the relation between physically touching and emotionally feeling to recenter the bodies and identities that are empowered, produced, and displaced by these digital technologies and settings. Drawing on detailed cases and humanities methods, White shows how and why gender, race, and sexuality should be further analyzed in relation to touchscreen use and design. White delves into such details as how women are informed that their bodies and fingernails are not a fit for iPhones, how cellphone surfaces are correlated with skin and understood as erotic, the ways social networks use heart buttons and icons to seem to physically and emotionally connect with individuals, how online references to feminine and queer feelings are resisted by many men, and how women producers of autonomous sensory meridian response (ASMR) videos use tactile strategies and touchscreens to emotionally bond with viewers. Proposing critical methods for studying touchscreens and digital engagement, Touch Screen Theory expands a variety of research areas, including digital and internet cultures, hardware, interfaces, media and screens, and popular culture