The ASMR Touch

Melinda Reid

Before ASMR videos, there were oceans. When taped, the ocean becomes a haze of waves breaking and distorting. When uploaded to YouTube, the ocean becomes search optimised. There are now oceans of digital oceans.

Before ASMR videos, there was Bob Ross on The Joy of Painting (1983-94). Instead of rolling and tussling waves, we see and hear Ross collect little rolls of paint on his palette knife. Ross softly shares oil painting tips, like making sounds to get the shapes of waves right. He impersonates waves crashing: schoo, tchwoong! His paint brushes make gentle scratchy sounds as they sweep across the canvas. I am haunted by a desire to be one of Ross’s canvases. 

Before ASMR videos, there were also guided meditations, relaxation tapes, Lita’s Massage Clips, and Maureen Garth books. There were Avon ladies and ladies who love curtains [1]. There was my primary school ‘computer time’ teacher, a delicate woman in her 70s with a pyramid of grey hair, who always spoke in a low parched whisper. She conducted her classes with the lights switched off and the air conditioning turned up high. Her cold cavern was lined with Windows ’95 computers.

ASMR videos are their own kind of post-internet ritual. Like relaxation tapes, ASMR videos are named after the feeling they are meant to produce: Autonomous Sensory Meridian Response, a term coined by Jennifer Allen only in 2010 to describe a relaxing tingling sensation. The videos tend to show a person performing quiet sounds and slow movements for a camera. The specific sounds and movements vary, but many are accompanied by canorous words whispered into sensitive binaural microphones [2]. A diverse range of key terms categorise ASMR videos into searchable genres: soft spoken, whispered, keyboard sounds,

massage, tapping, gaming, mukbang, inaudible whispers, cranial nerve exam, haircut, layered sounds, trigger compilation, unintentional ASMR, role play, personal attention. Videos that are over an hour in length are common and many have been watched millions of times on YouTube, or an ASMR-aligned app, like Calm or Tingles [3]. ASMR content is watched to various ends: to produce the feeling of ASMR proper, as background noise, to decrease anxiety, or hasten sleep. ASMRtists – a common, clunky portmanteau for producers of ASMR content (that I use reluctantly) – often complete their activities slowly and inefficiently. In the small subgenre of lid sound videos, for instance, jars are opened and closed in the most ineffective ways possible: the lids are twisted off and on slowly, repeatedly, with extended periods of the ASMRtist jangling the lid over the lipped opening of the jar, intentionally missing the tracks of the opening to elongate the lid’s journey downward. The performer takes their time to find the gentle musicality of the container and the best articulations for producing relaxing tones.

It is also not unusual to find ASMRtists caressing and caring for their camera as if it were a human, especially in role plays or personal attention videos. In these subgenres, the ASMRtist performs one half of a social encounter and interacts with the camera as if it were the viewer. The care demonstrated by the ASMRtist is parasocial, but performed as if their touches are received. For instance, in the opening minutes of Gentle Whispering ASMR’s video ‘... Face Tapping ... and Happiness 💆‍♀️ ASMR 💆‍♀️ Whisper Ear-to-Ear,’ she busies herself with tapping the camera/my face with her fingertips which have been bedazzled with jewel stickers.She slowly pads her fingers across the camera/my face, then her own. Every now and again, she directs her gaze towards me and speaks: ‘You know, I think that one of the most personal things [is] (…) when somebody touches your face.’ She also asks me questions, like, ‘How does this feel?’ All the while, she touches me/the camera, gently, slowly, and maintains a low whisper. Certain consonants catch on her tongue in little clacks that mirror the sounds coming from her bejewelled fingertips. Not so long ago, techno-utopianism had us believe that the internet brought the whole world to our fingertips. Now the internet is a place where someone's fingertips can explore my face.

There are a number of endearing oddities that characterise the treatment of the camera/me in these videos. Firstly, cameras map imperfectly to human faces. This makes the experience of simulated touch imaginative and awkward. Secondly, the conventions of ASMR videos are still being formalised and therefore the encounter between ASMRtist and camera feels unvarnished. Thirdly, the viewer of ASMR content is treated as human and non-human at the same time. The viewer is at once a fleshy, supple, and affected person, but also reconfigured and ‘thingified’ [4]. Fourthly, the mediated experience of touch via an ASMR video is pleasurable not in spite of its blemishes, but because of them. Touch becomes full of intriguing contradictions: devised and improvised, human and non-human, everywhere and nowhere, embodied and disembodied, intimate and distant, felt and unfelt. It is something that is there, and not there, like a haunting. This haunting requires two conditions: a shared fantasy and a cyborg-like entanglement with technology.

In the realist tradition of photography theory, the camera is a mechanical device (the bearer of an objectif, an instantaneous reproduction machine) that records light. These assumptions inform a number of influential moments in photography theory that only work if we believe that the camera catches what is really there [5]. When I watch ASMR videos, the ghost of Walter Benjamin wafts through my door to remind me that when reproductive technologies (like photographs) first appeared, they made the world reachable in unprecedented ways, democratising access to otherwise exclusive experiences, like art and music (albeit with diminished aura) [6]. Benjamin’s arguments hold true for ASMR videos; there is a sense in which the ASMR content recorded on a camera makes the viewer feel as if they are in a shared space with the ASMRtist [7]. I feel as if Gentle Whispering ASMR is touching my face.

The viewer of ASMR videos is well-versed in identifying their sight with the point-of-view of the camera lens. Cinema, television, video games, and pornography have been the training grounds for this pairing of human body with mechanical viewpoint. In the 1970s, psychoanalytic film criticism began to theorise that cinema encourages a certain type of gaze. In Christian Metz’s formative analysis, he argued that the spectator of cinema identifies with the camera’s viewpoint as their own perspective. Metz is haunted here by the spectre of Jacques Lacan and his theory of the mirror stage [8]. For Metz, cinema becomes entangled in a lifelong pursuit for wholeness during which we experience partial recognitions in surrounding people and images. This psychic drama is perhaps intensified when the figures on screen ‘break the fourth wall’ and appear to directly address the viewer/camera. This tactic is used by many ASMRtists. ASMR Maddy, for instance, regularly integrates softcore POV hetero-porn conventions into a cast of heteronormative fantasies directed toward the viewer, like ‘Flight Attendant Takes You To Paradise 🤤,’ ‘Cheerleader Boosts Your Confidence,’ and ‘Doctor Asks You VERY Personal Questions.’

In my early twenties, I was in a long distance relationship. When we were apart, all forms of affection were screen-based. When the distance became overwhelming, we would sometimes do this thing on our Skype calls 

A rare direct address of this fantasy takes place in ‘1300s A.D. ASMR~ Nun Takes Care of You In Bed {You Have the Plague}.’ In this video, the ASMRtist, Angelica, plays a perturbed nun. She reluctantly cares for the camera/me – a mediaeval townsperson dying of the Bubonic Plague – but only after receiving my life savings. The role play is thoroughly tongue-in-cheek, exaggerated to the point of absurdity, sometimes veering into hilarious cruelty. (These tendencies characterise many of Angelica’s videos and offer a welcome interruption to a genre that can be dominated by disquieting performances of a kind of heteronormative femininity that conflates girlfriends with busty ‘mommies’ who perform domestic labour, usually with impressively long nails [9].) Since I’m so sick, the nun refuses to touch me. Instead, she blesses me with ‘holy water’ stored in a plastic bottle that she ‘splashes’ near my face, but not on it. She explains:

The ASMRtist’s touch is not only mediated by a camera and a fantasy, but also by microphones, headphones, computers, cables, hard drives, servers (and so on),

Enmeshed with the ASMR cyborg, I discover that my textures and physical limits are a series of contradictory experiences. My eyes can be touched and I won't flinch. My nostrils and mouth can be covered without smothering me. I can be painted with a stranger’s spit during a pandemic. I can be covered with endless amounts of make-up. My teeth can be softened and hardened again by a cyberpunk doctor. A mechanic can clean the engine I’ve suddenly acquired which seems to emanate from my stomach. I can experience these things as pleasures instead of weird infringements.

In a behind-the-scenes video shot by Gentle Whispering ASMR, she reveals a camera that she has set up for a haircut role play. The camera is mounted on a mannequin that she has seated in an office chair. It is wearing a wig. Long brunette locks spill over either side of the camera’s cycloptic eye. It’s adorned with pink hairdressing clips and two large microphones pointing outward like Baby Spice’s pigtails. At first I’m startled, but then I realise – I’m looking at one end of the ASMR cyborg. This part of the assemblage can be doted on in my absence, besieged with untreated plague and sponsored content, covered in spit and make-up. When it bares its teeth, they soften and harden on my behalf.

I find a video of FredsVoice ASMR doing his best Bob Ross impersonation, replete with painting tips, permed wig, and chambray shirt.He applies a phthalo green sea to my face. I hear the ocean in his brushstrokes.

Melinda Reid

Dr. Melinda Reid is an art theorist, teacher, and writer. She teaches sessionally at the National Art School (NAS), University of New South Wales (UNSW), and the University of Technology Sydney (UTS). She is currently collaborating with Anastasia Murney and Aneshka Mora on research into the radical pedagogical potential of disco. Melinda’s most recent article, ‘Guilty Pleasures Revisited,’ can be found in the Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism.

Acknowledgements

ASMR sounds and whispers performed by Dominic Logel and Melinda Reid with sound production completed by Natalie Reid on unceded Gadigal and Wangal lands of the Eora Nation.