THEN I DON’T FEEL is a multi-channel video and sculptural installation made in response to the song my favourite things. The work uses highly stimulating YouTube genres as a vehicle to explore trauma, addiction and attention. Now that we can choose exactly what we want to watch whenever we want, screen time becomes an easy way to disassociate. In the new media ecology, we no longer need to use our imagination to indulge in ‘a few of our favourite things’, content farms are serving them up to us on demand.

The notion of toxic meditation is one of the core ideas of this work. It describes an activity that is physiologically functional and soothing as well as being negatively triggering or activating. Smoking for example is obviously toxic, but also creates a consciousness of breath and provides moments of reflection that are integral to many meditative practices.

 This notion fits with the trauma-informed model of addiction as a form of self-medication and helps to explain the ways we pathologise, medicate and treat, both by ourselves and others. The ancient greek word “pharmakon” is paradoxical and can be translated as “drug,” which means both “remedy” and “poison” and explains the potential for things to be working on us in different and often opposing ways. It also alludes to how the coping mechanisms of traumatized bodies can transform from protective to destructive over time, specifically the way in which the autonomic nervous system can become disregulated, veering between fight, flight and freeze without much grounding. 

This symbiosis of the positive and negative is baked into the song, not just in the lyrics, but also musically in the consistent and regular switching between major and minor chords, sonically oscillating between hope and despair. I have slowed the song down from its original length, exposing an unsettling, otherworldly musical space, that mirrors the audio content at the heart of the first wave of ASMR content.  

 The lyrics of the song have also informed the content of the work. Listening to the words I realised that the list of ‘favourite things’ describes specific and fleeting moments of sensual intensity as much as it does physical objects.

 The line: ‘brown paper packages tied up with string’, made me think of the now ubiquitous unboxing video and the strange seductive draw of this type of content. More generally the list in the song could be a scene-by-scene description of the images in any one of the literally thousands of ‘oddly satisfying’ videos that have become increasingly popular. 

These videos are presented to us as being something other than or more than just entertainment. With titles like: ‘1 hour satisfying video under relaxing deep sleep music stress relief meditation 😴😴😴’ their capacity to affect our bodies and nervous systems rather than just our intellect or emotions is implied.

 For part of this work I fed an AI program with thousands of images of thumbnails from popular videos designed to soothe young children. It was trained to create new images based on images it has seen. The AI is essentially doing a condensed and isolated version of something I see happening in wider culture. It is creating new images based solely on the information it gathers from existing images. It has no intelligence beyond this one task though, no wider contextual information to draw from, so the results often look illogical or monstrous to the human brain with our complex web of intelligences, memories, and emotions.

 What marks this moment in media history as different from the old ‘bread and circuses’ fear that tv is numbing our brains, making us docile and apathetic, is that the content in question is actually created by individual themselves, based on their own idiosyncratic proclivities, and the clinical collection and analysis of their viewing data. 

This results in  the propagation of some pretty surreal content.  Some of the videos seem illogical or completely bizarre to our conscious human minds. For example it’s hard to find logical reasons for the numerous youtube channels dedicated to videos of cars running over food and toys, often in compilations that run for hours at a time.

 The identification of the physiological power  of these videos, along with other forms of ASMR content, happened to a large extent organically through the formation of communities sharing and commenting on user generated content.  

These platforms are not neutral spaces though. They are businesses that create politicised and monetised marketplaces of one particular commodity: our attention. As we’ve seen in so many internet related examples, new forms of media that arise through community experimentation are very soon monopolised by entrepreneurial capitalists. Content that genuinely can soothe, relax and make us feel satisfied on an autonomous level, might be appealing to various different vested interests, and it’s not hard to imagine how this form of ‘aesthetic technology’ might be put to use for not entirely positive reasons.

This is maybe one of the reasons that there has been an explosion of video content farms (channels that use search algorithm data to create large quantities of particular types of video, in order to rank highly in searches and create advertising revenue)  this content might not always fit strictly into the asmr or ‘oddly satisfying’ genres, but there is lots of evidence that they utilise many visual codes and forms of representation learned from them. More significantly though they have learned how to appeal to our bodies autonomous systems that control our actions and decisions but function outside of our consciousness. The same autonomous systems that become dysregulated by trauma.

I have observed some clear visual themes, in the video content being produced by these content farms, that a suggest that unresolved trauma may play a role in their subconscious appeal. The most prominent of these themes, which I reference in the work are: the oversimplification/sanitisation of the world into sickly sweet perfect versions of everyday things, and also images that allude to abject violence or annihilation (crushing, cutting, falling). 

As someone who experiences trauma related hyperarousal I find highly stimulating videos both calming and triggering. A large part of this work is an attempt to try and understand what it is they are doing to me. To what extent are these videos cathartic, or triggering, or are they both; creating a toxic and mesmerising meditation. Seductively drawing me in and soothing me on one level whilst also activating damaging responses and physiological states. What does the increasing consumption of videos like this mean? Where do we go from here?

As another equally insightful song also from the sound of music put’s it:

Oh, how do you solve a problem like Maria?

How do you hold a moonbeam in your hand?

When I'm with her I'm confused

Out of focus and bemused

And I never know exactly where I am

Unpredictable as weather

She's as flighty as a feather

She's a darling! She's a demon! She's a lamb!