Embrace the Weird
ĒTER’s pillow-based exhibition design for Weird Sensation Feels Good (photo: courtesy of the Design Museum).
What do the following have in common? Björk taking apart her cathode-ray tube TV and comparing its innards to a cityscape; a fluffy, white dog being groomed in a salon, satisfying scissor snips revealing a glimpse of an eye here and there; the tinkling of an aeroplane drinks trolley as the captain is heard over the intercom; a woman whispering, “for those of you who love to hear people whisper”; the BBC’s Shipping Forecast from 16 February 2022.
The connection may not be obvious. If you consider these videos as examples of design, they all have different aesthetic qualities and have been made to variously inform, entertain, document or advertise. In this respect, there is little common ground. What does unite them, however, is that they are all capable of eliciting a specific emotional and physiological response in some of those who watch or listen to them. Ranging from a feeling of calm to euphoria, accompanied by a tingling sensation that may start in your scalp and move down your neck, spine and arms, this sensation is known as ASMR, or Autonomous Sensory Meridian Response. As such, these videos are also united by having been brought together for Weird Sensation Feels Good (WSFG), an exhibition on ASMR curated by James Taylor-Foster. It initially ran in 2020 at ArkDes in Stockholm, where Taylor-Foster is curator of contemporary architecture and design, that was on show at the Design Museum in London until 16 October 2022. ASMR may still be an unfamiliar term to some, but a quick search online summons more than 900m results – largely videos on platforms such as YouTube and Twitch. The phenomenon was first named in a Facebook group called “Autonomous Sensory Meridian Response Group” by Jennifer Allen in 2010 and, in recent years, has enjoyed a meteoric rise in popularity via the internet; WSFG is the first IRL (in real life) exhibition on the phenomenon.
You may ask: why is this at a design museum? There are few traditional design objects on show in WSFG, but both of the exhibition’s host museums argue that design should be seen as a more expansive field than can be captured by familiar exhibits such as chairs, consumer electronics or shoes.[1] Instead, both ArkDes and the Design Museum predicate their programming on the idea that whatever the subject, looking at its design can afford new knowledge about people, places and things – and, more broadly, about the way we live. This may mean reframing a familiar subject, such as the Design Museum’s 2022 exhibition Football: Designing the Beautiful Game, but it is also common for museums to venture into the unknown, looking to speculative design or design futures. As with anything future-orientated, these tend towards the utopic or dystopic, with design stressed as the deciding force that could tip us in either direction.
A Neumann KU 100 Dummy head binaural stereo microphone for immersive 3D sound (photo: Georg Neumann).
It is under both rubrics that Taylor-Foster set up his exhibition. “I felt that ASMR[…] could tell us something about the questions that design is there to inform us about,” he says. “How are we living today and what is happening to us?” ASMR is not only an internet culture, Taylor-Foster argues, and “this is an exhibition that is telling us about larger societal questions, whether that be surrounding mental health, loneliness, and stress and anxiety[…] or [about how] the design of technology relates to public life.”
Under the internet-speak of its title – the subject line of a 2007 forum post on steadyhealth.com dedicated to the then-unnamed sensation – the exhibition’s tagline is “design that mediates between mind and body.” The featured designers (and content creators) are known as ASMRtists, who create experiences to trigger ASMR in their viewers, perhaps by tapping objects in specific ways, whispering, or simulating intimate situations such as giving their viewer a facial. Similar health benefits are attributed to ASMR as those derived from meditation or yoga, which is perhaps reflective of ASMR’s initial “discovery” on the discussion thread of a health forum. “Anecdotally, ASMR is being used more and more as a form of self-medication against the effects of loneliness, insomnia, stress, and anxiety,” the exhibition text says. “[This] is a cue to its success, to its transcendental appeal.” This kind of social framing immediately helps to provide ASMR with real-world validity and a sense of urgency.
Regardless, it is clear that ASMR is complicated: is it offline or online? New-fangled or, as Taylor-Foster suggests, primeval? Medical or recreational? There is a lot to cover in the exhibition given that ASMR is variously described by WSFG as a “community”, a “creative field”, a “culture” and a “format”, and there are plenty of challenges too. “Even making a loan agreement for a YouTube video – there’s no precedent for that,” says Taylor-Foster, adding that most of the ASMRtists thought they were being scammed when first approached by ArkDes. In this respect, generating a sense of mainstream validity seems to have been important to Taylor-Foster, who says that he hopes to “plant a flag in the ground” for ASMR, introducing it to those who may never have heard of it. Rather than drawing a line around what ASMR is or isn’t, the curation focuses on its experiential elements so that visitors can make up their own mind – while hopefully even experiencing ASMR themselves. Immersive and experiential exhibitions are undoubtedly a current curation trend – to which the phenomenon of proliferating Van Gogh “experiences” bears witness – but WSFG’s wider aim is egalitarian. “One of the most interesting things about Weird Sensation Feels Good,” Taylor-Foster explains, “is that the only prerequisite to experiencing the exhibition is whether or not you can feel something.”
With this in mind, the exhibition is intentionally light on text (with more information provided in an optional booklet), although some loose definitions of ASMR are offered at the start, alongside a glossary of terminology such as “trigger” and “synaesthesia”. There are documents from Allen’s archive printed on the wall, such as the first ASMR Facebook group charter, although these are rather dense and uninviting. More engaging is the series of videos showing ASMRtists defining what ASMR means to them, such as this from Life with MaK: “[ASMR] reminds me of when my mum used to stroke my back, or my friends used to play with my hair; how it gave me loads of goosebumps which are called tingles, tingles, tingles, tingles. And that’s what ASMR is, but through a screen.”
The ASMR Arena (photo: Ed Reeve for the Design Museum).
The majority of the subsequent exhibits are ASMR videos, “carefully chosen from hundreds of thousands of possible works,” Taylor-Foster explains. Their labels divide them into “intentional” and “unintentional” ASMR – the latter triggering ASMR thanks to qualities such as rambling narratives, hypnotic motion or completing intricate tasks. There is, however, little attention paid to one kind of video that dominates internet-search results for ASMR: films of young, pretty and most often white or East Asian women (although there is a wider demographic of ASMRtists working in this genre too) simulating close personal attention with kind eyes and soothing voices. These types of video are not shown in full, but are instead glimpsed only briefly among the short clips featured in Definitions of ASMR by ASMRtists, one of the exhibits within WSFG. It could be inferred that Taylor-Foster hoped to move beyond what the algorithm typically churns up – he describes ASMR as “an extremely diverse and divergent world of creativity” – but given this genre’s popularity, its absence from the exhibition would surely confuse those who look online after visiting.
For those looking for more conventionally “designed” exhibits, WSFG breaks you in gently with five works of motion graphics, such as Synthetic Crops by artist and design duo Wang & Söderström, where ambiguous vegetal forms shudder, bubble and pop. Defined as “visual ASMR”, the ASMR-inducing qualities of videos of this ilk seem to have influenced a more widespread design aesthetic that is increasingly prevalent across both physical and virtual realities: soft shapes, pastel colours and minimalist backdrops and smooth renderings. The few physical objects in the exhibition include equipment typically used to make ASMR videos, such as sensitive binaural microphones shaped like ears, perfect for tickling and whispering into; and ASMR-adjacent “soft” tech, such as Marc Teyssier’s prototype for Artificial Skin for Mobile Devices, a skin-like cover that you can pinch and stroke.
Across all of this, a general vibe for ASMR is established, perhaps best exemplified by the inclusion of Bob Ross’s instructional TV show, The Joy of Painting, which enjoys a whole room in the London exhibition. Ross is an important figure in ASMR, despite having died 14 years before the phenomenon was even named. With his soft voice and encouraging words to his audience, accompanied by the sounds and close shots of his “wet-on-wet” painting technique, Ross ticks a lot of ASMR’s boxes. Since episodes of the show were broadcast on Twitch in 2014, he has come to be known as the “Grandfather of ASMR” and grown an audience of more than 5.3 million subscribers, having by now far surpassed the million followers who earned his YouTube channel (posthumously set up in his name) a Gold Creator Award in 2018.[2]
Taking the digital offline
The biggest challenge facing the curators of WSFG was the fact that ASMR is created to be viewed alone with headphones in a private space. Not knowing whether it would even work in the museum – a fear echoed by a number of the ASMRtists featured in the show – “was one of the core experiments of the exhibition,” explains Taylor-Foster.
“I ran a small ideas competition with five different architecture studios,” he continues. “I gave them a very simple brief – most of them had never heard of ASMR before –and I said, ‘I just want one image of how you would spatialise this show.’” From very different options, he picked Riga-based ĒTER’s design.
Meridians Meet by Julie Rose Bower.
“Our initial goal was to create space that would be experiential by merging what you see and hear with how you feel inside the [architecture],” ĒTER tells me. At ArkDes, ĒTER’s design covered the whole of the space, while at the Design Museum it forms a central “arena”. Stepping onto a cream carpet (shoes must be removed), visitors are confronted with approximately 90m of wiggling sausage pillow – either intestinal or brain-like – that creates distinctly un-museum-like walls and seating. “When I saw ĒTER’s sketch[…] it clicked in my mind [that] my position was not to glorify internet aesthetics, which is what usually happens in these kinds of exhibitions,” Taylor-Foster explains. Instead, he wanted “softness” and a “spa for the soul”, making for an unhurried museum experience while simultaneously translating into architecture what the exhibition suggests ASMR does on the internet. “ASMRtists do not seek to entertain but to relax; for ‘experiencers’, they offer a degree of insulation from a noisy, wandering world,” the exhibition text states. Taylor-Foster adds that this additionally aimed to open up space for vulnerability. As suggested by the name “arena”, part of the ASMR-like experience is watching and being watched.
This participatory dynamic is also at play in Meridians Meet, a new commission for the Design Museum version of the show by artist and researcher Julie Rose Bower, which allows visitors to make ASMR for themselves. Taking cues from the design of sensory spaces, it creates a welcoming and inclusive environment. Five stations are designed to trigger ASMR in different ways, reframing familiar items such as an arcade coin spinner. “I tried to create a bridge between[...] the world we all know [and ASMR],” says Bower. This approach allows visitors to take up an active role as both ASMR performer and audience, yet while the installation is intended to be cross-generational, older visitors remain the most hesitant, she adds.
The 2D design – including captions, signs, vinyls, digital graphic layers and a booklet by Agga Stage and Alexander Söder, with Emil Andersson – takes cues from digital, making particular use of “hyperlink blue” and “hyperlink purple”, but these, as Taylor-Foster suggests, appear softer once removed from the backlit screen. Meanwhile, ĒTER’s design also makes a feature of the technology through which ASMR is mediated, with “TV chandeliers” wreathed in chunky cables and dangling headphones. “ASMR content is created, amplified and perceived with the help of technological extensions of our bodies,” the studio tells me. “Devices such as extra-sensitive microphones, headphones, cables, and smartphones give us new superpowers for pleasure and relaxation.” There is a degree of sci-fi kitsch: brightly hued moulded hands among the cables evoke a cyborgian state and the abundant wires seem anachronistic in our near-wireless world (while nicely prompting conversations over the inevitable tangling of headphones).
Taylor-Foster explains that the “radical” aim at the exhibition’s core is to intervene in how we conceive of exhibition spaces and public space more generally – although this is perhaps more relevant at ArkDes where entrance is free. Taylor-Foster recounts a charming anecdote of an elderly couple falling asleep together on the exhibition’s second day at ArkDes, while during my own visit to the Design Museum I witnessed a woman nestle in amongst the pillows, lay her jacket over herself, put the headphones on, and finally don an eye mask. On the other hand, one group appeared distinctly uncomfortable and left the area quickly without sitting down or watching the videos. A disappointment is that accessibility has not been prioritised, and some of those with mobility issues would struggle to clamber over the uneven seating in order to have the proposed experience of this space. This seems particularly pointed given ASMR’s usual digital form. In 2020, ArkDes broadcast a 90-minute “virtual vernissage” for the exhibition’s opening, which was created when the pandemic prevented a conventional launch. But while this film is still accessible online, it is not promoted as part of the Design Museum show – echoing the more widespread disappearance of virtual events after the peak of the pandemic.
A challenging exhibition
So what does WSFG represent in exhibition making? Digital and online culture remain relatively uncharted waters for museums, and while all new things present challenges, ASMR may be seen to pose a greater one than many. There are still relatively few scientific studies to testify to its existence and everyone responds differently to the phenomenon, including by sometimes having no discernible response at all. The proximity to sexual pleasure of ASMR – early names including “braingasm” – also causes friction, and it is notable that right from the beginning Allen pivoted away from this term and opted instead for an assemblage of pseudo-medical words.
The Voice of Touch by Marc Teyssier.
This may be why many institutions have been slow to explore ASMR, despite its popularity in the media and online. One exception, however, is ASMR at the Museum, a programme created by Julie Rose Bower for the Victoria and Albert museum (V&A), one episode of which is included in WSFG. Bower talked to me about the “reticence” that shaped the project: the V&A explicitly approached her rather than an ASMRtist, considering her design-led content more appropriate for the museum and its staff. The videos’ specific genre of ASMR focuses on close attention – another example in WSFG being The Lost Art of PasteUp video by Anthony Wilks for the London Review of Books – which has something to offer museums in sensorially documenting “[the] relationship between expert [conservator] and the object; it’s about celebrating the collection through direct contact,” she explains. Yet while Bower is documenting the “native ASMR” of museum conservation, “I always frame it with the microphones in shot,” she says, “because it has always been an ASMR project.”[3] Receiving millions of views, the series has been a success both as ASMR and as a tool for a museum. The Courtauld Gallery has since approached Bower too.
It’s possible that some of these same fears apply to WSFG. Museums are intended as inclusive spaces, able to appeal to those who know nothing about a subject as well as those who have an active interest. But still it could be argued that the WSFG team played it safe. Bower commented to me that there was a sense in which ASMR’s highly codified aesthetics were not right for the V&A and this typology – carefully made-up women with long manicured nails, using feminine props in bedroom settings or against green screens – is notably absent from WSFG too. Nor are there other, more challenging subgenres of the phenomenon, such as Mukbang, which translates from the Korean as “eating broadcast”, and features people eating large quantities of food. Eating noises are a common trigger for both misophonia (hatred of sound) and ASMR: a repulsion/attraction dichotomy that would be interesting to explore and experience.[4] There is also the question of NSFW (not safe for work) ASMR, which has a sizeable presence on sites such as PornHub, but Taylor-Foster considers these videos to be later fragmentations rather than a core genre of ASMR and delineates ASMR as “more sensual than sexual”. He does, however, discuss with me how “there is so much correlation between sensuality, sexuality and the feeling of security that ASMR can provide,” while in an essay for EXTRA EXTRA in 2020 he explored the connection more explicitly: “As I write this essay, there are close to ten thousand heterosexual porn videos tagged as ‘ASMR’ on PornHub. On PornHub Gay, there are a little over five hundred, although I’m at a loss in understanding quite what PornHub choose to define as ‘gay’. According to PornHub, ‘ASMR’ ranks 4,591st for daily searches, making it roughly equal in popularity to searches for ‘sextape’, ‘waitress’, ‘male stripper’, and ‘hunky’.” This discussion, however, does not make it into either the curation or text for WSFG and it seems that such discourse within the museum is a long way off. While this is understandable given museums’ need to appeal to broad audiences, what is the cost of sanitising ASMR in this way?
In general, the framing of the subject and the specific works on show in WSFG can feel uneven. This is part-explained by ASMR’s newness; TaylorFoster points out the lack of experts in the field, and that many of the clinical trials of ASMR by Giulia Poerio, a leading psychologist researching ASMR and a consultant on the project, post-date the exhibition’s shaping. It would, however, be possible to look more at what is better understood. Take the design of the internet and its platforms, for example. The exhibition’s booklet references the birth of YouTube and our attachment to handheld devices, and suggests that some of the problems of our reality, such as the “sense of restlessness” bred by the attention economy, are something that ASMR is able to “harness” for good: “[ASMR] subverts these technologies to provide a new form of care. It carves a niche on the internet and fills this space with personal attention, available on demand.” Yet it seems simplistic to attribute too much agency to ASMRtists working within the constraints of a particular platform, and the booklet does not mention the astonishingly high financial rewards that a small number are able to earn from using these platforms[5] or consider how the large presence of ASMR content contributes to YouTube’s own economy.
A Neumann KU 100 Dummy head binaural stereo microphone on display.
Meanwhile, the suggestion that ASMR is “carving a niche” of its own serves to erase a longer history of digital communities of care. ASMR may be a kind and seemingly (or, perhaps, bizarrely) troll-free space within the now-Facebook-dominated model of Web 2.0, but there are older online communities that performed similarly. In my own mid-noughties digital wanderings, for example, I discovered online spaces similarly centred around health issues offering a great deal of support and kinship, and as far back as 1998 Annette Markham’s Life Online: Researching Real Experience in Virtual Space discussed digital intimacies across “significant support groups, social networks, and even communities[…] The stories about the meaningful consequences of these social contexts astounded me.” Markham described the strong physical presence felt by those she interviewed, concluding: “It is crucial to emphasise this point: To be present in cyberspace is to learn how to be embodied there. To be embodied there is to participate.” On the other hand, ASMR may not always be as kind as its community wishes. There is a contiguity of negative experiences between the wider internet and ASMR, such as the extreme attention that women receive online including cyberstalking, of which there have been recent cases involving ASMRtists, as well as the vulnerability of underage practitioners. “The question is,” Amelia Tait wrote for Wired in 2019, “is it right for a child to trigger[…] ‘head-to-toe euphoria’ in adults,” before listing cases in which young ASMRtists were asked by adult fans to “do really perverse things that [they] obviously didn’t understand [they] shouldn’t be doing.”
In this vein, looking more closely at the context of the internet and its platforms could help us to consider how ASMR itself has been shaped: how much of the internet’s legacy can be found in ASMR, and would a different category of ASMR have emerged from platforms or technologies which prioritised different things?[6] It would have been possible within the exhibition, for instance, to mention the dominance of women ASMRtists and their often ultra-feminine presentation. As a design question, this could relate to the gendering of assistant technologies, for example, while as a larger societal question it could add to the conversation around the disproportionate burden of emotional labour and caring duties carried by women more generally. The exhibition booklet quotes from Julie Beck’s 2016 Atlantic piece ‘The Emotional Labor of ASMR’, but it does not engage with its framing of ASMR as labour, or its questioning of the monetary value of this “not trivial” service of on-demand emotional support.
Redefining the design lens
The question surrounding women in ASMR could also be reframed, however: should women be given more credit for dominating this field as creative practitioners? This brings into question the idea of a design lens. Design discourse sometimes struggles to move beyond a core notion of “good design” – with all its various historical and social entanglements – but ASMR’s qualities are far removed from any notion of design represented by mid-century modern chairs or the architecture of Le Corbusier. Historically feminised disciplines such as textiles, fashion or performance have typically been given less interpretative clout than something like architecture, but these fields could be more relevant when approaching subjects such as ASMR. When I ask Bower about the feminist aspect of her wider work, for instance, she explains her interest in Foley and ASMR as marginalised practices that foreground the body, and which, she suggests, engage a style of “creative listening” in a similar manner to the work of composers Pauline Oliveros and Annea Lockwood. But for WSFG, she notes that she was not commissioned to engage with the gender politics of ASMR. “Then look who comes to see it!” she adds. “Some people think the gender politics, like the femme-ness, has been overstated; I don’t agree.”
Sound and Vision by Chris Milk.
It seems that some of ASMR’s “feminine” or otherwise “challenging” aesthetics have been left out in WSFG’s attempt to validate ASMR as design. This strikes me as unfortunate. This response may be prompted by my own background in fashion, a design discipline that stubbornly resists narratives of making the world “better” and which knows that elements of “bad taste” can be both affective and desirable. But to really make the most of ASMR, WSFG should instead have more strongly embraced the “weird” of its title (although Immeasurable thirst / That feeling by Tobias Bradford, a mechanised disembodied tongue eerily flexing and dribbling spit from one corner of the room, is rather weird), leaning into those areas that arouse discomfort, and not hiding from aspects that complicate or compromise its framing as design. While ĒTER’s spatial translation is effective in creating an immersive and notably different space to engage visitors, its clean, cream embrace seems too utopian. However, upon visiting a second time, I did witness the commotion of one visitor shouting, “I can’t hear you,” and pointing to his headphones while Design Museum staff tried in vain to get him to remove his shoes. This felt more faithful to the chaos of the internet: there’s always a troll, someone flouting the community guidelines of even the most carefully moderated online spaces.
As the first of its kind, WSFG will, Taylor-Foster hopes, allow visitors to “feel comfortable enough or primed enough to understand how [ASMR] relates to how you see the world.” He continues: “Like any good exhibition, it’s something to position yourself against. When you’re looking at something so contemporary, that’s the main job.” The exhibition is engaging and is able to introduce ASMR both concretely and in more ephemeral ways, but some of the decisions obfuscate rather than open up, framing the subject nicely, but losing sight of what lies just out of shot. If ASMR can help to expand our understanding of design, then it at least needs to be met on its own terms.
1 As evidence of the way in which what we deem to be “core design” changes over time, it is worth noting that as recently as 2004 the Design Museum was accused by James Dyson of “neglecting its purpose” and becoming a “style showcase” when it hosted an exhibition devoted to shoe designer Manolo Blahnik.
2 The channel was set up and run by Janson Media, which bought the digital rights to Ross’s show in 2014, working with Bob Ross, Inc.
3 Interestingly, this has been labelled “unintentional ASMR” in WSFG; Bower considers this a compliment.
4 Global cultural variance comes into play here too and TaylorFoster is keen to see the exhibition travel to outside of Europe, in particular to Korea.
5 The highest earning ASMRtist is believed to be South Korea’s Jane ASMR, whose monthly income has been reported as $500,000.
6 See ‘The Online Ass Wars’ by Carolina Are in Disegno #32 and books such as An Internet for the People: The Politics and Promise of Craigslist by Jessa Lingel.
Words Sophie Tolhurst
Images courtesy of the Design Museum and ArkDes
This article was originally published in Disegno #34. To buy the issue, or subscribe to the journal, please visit the online shop.
Weird Sensation Feels Good was on display at the Design Museum until 16 October 2022.