What happens to the sounds and intimacy of ASMR video encounters when the visual element is removed? Is the soothing tingling experience purely sonic, or some way dependent upon the visual cues in the videos? On a first level, Tolan crafts an exploration of the interplay between sight and sound, inviting the audience to compare their ASMR viewing experience with real versus recreated sounds. Audio waves cause objects to vibrate at a frequency that is not perceived by the human eye. By recording ASMR videos with a simple point-and-shoot camera to capture these movements, then using algorithms developed by MIT to process them back into sound, Tolan tests the effect of short-circuiting the visual and aural.
Through her use of the laser microphone and audio extraction algorithms, Tolan opens the door to a second level of investigation into surveillance technology – for which radio has long been a primary medium both as enabler and circumventer. By connecting ASMR to the latest developments in acoustic surveillance technologies and computation, Tolan renders visible the workings, potentials and dangers of being able to control and analyze the frequency domain, which serve as a basis of all forms of human communication and perception.
On a third level, the work investigates the complex intertwinement of direct physiological effects of frequencies and the psychological effects of narratives, role-playing, and intimacy, and on the possibilities of new forms of intimacy mediated by communication technologies.
Commissioned as part of the CTM Radio Lab, led by CTM Festival and Deutschlandfunk Kultur – Radio Art / Klangkunst in collaboration with Goethe-Institut, ORF musikprotokoll im steirischen herbst, Ö1 Kunstradio, and The Wire magazine.