Article:

Touchscreens, tactility, and material traces: From avant-garde artists to Instagram ASMRtists

This article identifies and historicises gestural trends in ASMR (Autonomous Sensory Meridian Response) videos on the social media site Instagram, where media objects foregrounding touch and texture are shared via specialist accounts and hashtags such as #satisfyingvideos and #slimeasmr. While much of the initial scholarship on ASMR culture has focused on understanding the psychological and physiological aspects of ASMR (a tingly bodily sensation triggered by specific auditory or visual stimuli), I instead explore the visual aesthetics of hand-focused ASMR videos in relation to theories of haptic visuality and the touchscreen. In particular, the article historicises the filming of dexterous hands that interact with subjects like soap, slime, and paint in relation to practices of avant-garde film and women’s decorative arts, examining how these diverse media forms can all represent traces of the creator’s hand in the work itself. In considering, for example, Stan Brakhage’s hand-painted films and Mary Ellen Bute’s use of the oscilloscope as a proto-touchscreen device, I aim to reveal how both avant-garde artists and so-called ‘ASMRtists’ can channel the mediums and platforms of their times towards distinctly tactile kinds of audiovisual experiences. I argue that since Instagram’s ASMR videos are typically activated using a finger on a touchscreen then the anonymous surrogate hands contained within can allow for a vicarious kind of tactile pleasure, one that can lead to distinctly digital forms of sensory stimulation.