From cucumber-crunchers to cranial exams, YouTube is full of ASMRtists provoking the strangely pleasurable autonomous sensory meridian response. Now they´ve got their own euphoric museum showSome whisper gently into the microphone, while tapping their nails along the spine of a book. Others take a bar of soap and slice it methodically into tiny cubes, letting the pieces clatter into a plastic tray. There are those who dress up as doctors and pretend to perform a cranial nerve exam, and the ones who eat food as noisily as they can, recording every crunch and slurp in 3D stereo sound.To an outsider, the world of ASMR videos can be a baffling, kooky place. In a fast-growing corner of the internet, millions of people are watching each other tap, rattle, stroke and whisper their way through hours of homemade videos, with the aim of being lulled to sleep, or in the hope of experiencing `the tingles` - AKA, the autonomous sensory meridian response.`It feels like a rush of champagne bubbles at the top of your head,` says curator James Taylor-Foster. `There´s a mild sense of euphoria and a feeling of deep calm.` Taylor-Foster has spent many hours trawling the weirdest depths of YouTube in preparation for a new exhibition, Weird Sensation Feels Good, at ArkDes, Sweden´s national centre for architecture and design, on what he sees as one of the most important creative movements to emerge from the internet. (Though the museum has been closed due to the coronavirus pandemic, the show will be available to view online.)ArkDes, Stockholm will be broadcasting a virtual vernissage of Weird Sensation Feels Good on 7 April at 16.00 BST. You can tune into e-flux.com/live for a tour of the exhibition. ArkDes is due to reopen on 14 April; the show runs until 1 November. Continue reading...
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