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

Abstract

The specifics of Instagram’s touchscreen-driven interface further confirm the significance of hands – both those of so-called ‘ASMRtists’ and the audiences who watch and activate the videos using their own fingers – to ASMR videos.[9] By engaging with scholarship on hand-held and touchscreen devices, such as that of Heidi Rae Cooley and David Parisi, I position the hand-focused ASMR videos in relation to studies of how mobile screen devices allow for more tactile forms of vision. Initially writing on handheld devices pre-touchscreen, Cooley identifies the sensual forms of viewing that can be facilitated through handheld devices – with such forms of tactile vision intensifying since 2007 with the popular emergence of touchscreen interfaces on the iPhone and similar devices.[10] More specifically, I align hand-focused ASMR videos with Parisi’s discussion of the fifth phase of haptic interfacing, that of the twenty-first century, wherein digital technology firms like Apple and Nintendo ‘crafted an image of the cultural sensorium in a state of urgent crisis that touch interfaces were uniquely qualified to alleviate’.[11] As Parisi argues in Archaeologies of Touch , advertising campaigns for Apple iPhones and Nintendo DS game consoles presented a narrative that ‘the sense of touch has been forgotten, left behind, and marginalized by a media interfacing schematic overdependent on audiovisual technologies’.[12] Parisi explains that advertisements for such products sought to ‘foster a desire in consumers to reconnect with their lost sense of touch’, while also fetishising the ‘technologized reincarnation’ of touch, one signalling towards ‘a utopic future of fully embodied presence in digital worlds’.[13] As the remainder of this article will explore, the appeal and impact of hand-focused ASMR videos further extends on tactile forms of vision and on the narrative that digital technologies can facilitate a remediated re-connection with touch.