Videos like this are recorded using ‘binaural’ equipment: two microphones shaped like human ears, and spaced accordingly, in order to capture sound in three dimensions. When I listen, with in-ear noise-cancelling speakers, it’s as if I insert my head into that space, the space Olivia describes with her words and gestures. Where the video camera is concerned, there is not quite such a snug fit between my own sensing apparatus and the recording equipment. At the scene of recording, there is an eye-like lens; at the scene of spectating, a screen. This is the window through which I look, and on to which Olivia projects my entire face.
Amongst the unresolved issues of the ASMR role-play video, particularly of the face-touching variety: Where is my nose? Does it float transparently in the middle of my face/screen? Or should it be located somewhere unseen, off the lower edge, below my line of sight? Different ASMR artists have devised their own ways around this predicament. Olivia will say and now I’m just going to do your nose, and at the same time stroke, say, a cotton wool pad (freshly moistened in splashy, ceremonious fashion, with fragrant rose water) in a vertical line down the middle of the screen. Ah, some part of me thinks, that’s surely not where my nose is, would be, should be; surely that’s the middle of my… eye?
Tricky moments such as this do not, for me, ruin the effect of the role play. I find the mediated encounter intensely lovely not in spite of these wonky conceits, but because of them. The representational conventions of the ASMR role-play are not quite established, still buzzing around the edges, and I like those moments when the joins are visible because they intensify the intimacy, the sense of colluding in a fiction.
5. When I am watching Olivia, I am participating in the fiction, the role-play. (Although it doesn’t look much like ‘participation’, what I am doing here, horizontal and limp-limbed, staring into a screen.) Of course, I am aware, as she knows I am, that she is, in fact, speaking not to ‘me’ (or anybody’s body or face) but to a camera and a microphone. Her performance of care, tending the body and its parts, is directed towards this hardware, these devices.
In poetry or rhetoric, the direct address of an absent, or indeed an inanimate, being is named ‘apostrophe’. As when Yeats, for example, intones ‘O chestnut tree’, or Shelley ‘O wild West Wind’. The term ‘apostrophe’ is, according to Barbara Johnson, ‘based etymologically on the notion of turning aside, of digressing from straight speech’, and ‘manipulates the I/thou structure of direct address in an indirect, fictionalised way’. She calls
