Reassembling digital intimacy

Abstract

ASMR, an online phenomenon comprising videos in which a performer employs technologically processed sounds to evoke a pleasurable, tingling sensation in the viewer and foster a sense of intimacy has been rapidly gaining popularity in recent years, with its aesthetic increasingly adopted in popular music. The paper investigates one example of such imbrication, Zaumne’s album, Emo Dub (2018), which samples voices from ASMR videos, transforming them into disembodied intensities, detached from their original context. As such, Zaumne’s music goes beyond either merely incorporating aspects of ASMR, or deconstructing it in a critical fashion; instead, it modulates its affective potential for affording mediated intimacy. Consequently, drawing on the concepts of networked affect and assemblages, the paper argues that Zaumne’s music exhibits a form of posthuman intimacy that does not pertain to relations between subjects, but rather to attunement with the impersonal dynamic of digital networks: the constant circulation of content, and the random and contingent affective encounters that produce transpersonal identities and subjectivities.