53 HAPPENING Video Vortex
characterised by a tingling on the scalp or down the spine. The response is often induced by sound, often evoking a very specific (possibly delicate) texture, or by the sound of a close human whisper. Some ASMR YouTube videos get hundreds of thousands of views – some have sexual overtones, some help you get to sleep and some are just oddball fun. For some of the attendees, it was the first exposure to the ASMR phenomenon and there was a lot of surprise at how mere internet audio could produce such a remarkable physical response. It brought up speculation on what the future interface might be between the virtual world and human physiology. THE SILVER SCREEN Video Vortex also included a film festival, screening experimental video pieces from around the world. This included, in some cases, the filmmakers in attendance and engaged in discussion about their work with attendees. Of particular note were Lotte Louise de Jong’s film BRB (see our look at her film Talk Neural To Me on page 49), which was edited exclusively from video from sex webcams – not footage of the performers,
but of the silent moments at the start, when no one is in front of the camera and viewers are watching only an empty room, waiting for people to appear, exchanging banalities in the chat window. At the other end of the spectrum were films like Adam Fish’s experimental documentary Points Of Presence , which employed spectacular drone shots following the building of fibre infrastructure from Iceland to the Faroe Islands, and Shetland Islands to the UK. It conveyed a sense of a world-wide infrastructure being implanted into the landscape, as if the project were to make the whole earth a kind of colossal cyborg. Other, harder-to-watch films included a montage of infrared combat footage from the Iraq War, which turned warfare into an eerie enterprise in swatting tiny, nameless insects, and Salvador Miranda’s film Aim Down Sights , which was built from a terrorist attack scenario in a first-person shooter video game. Social media was a central theme throughout the conference – and in the filmmaking – with chatrooms, Instagram, and mashed-up YouTube footage featuring heavily. There were also references to the more mainstream fair that explored these
subjects. Netflix’s Cam , a story about a cam girl told almost entirely through the imagery appearing on a desktop computer, was a frequent cultural reference point throughout the conference, as was the 2015 supernatural horror film Unfriended . A number of other cultural touchstones kept recurring throughout the presentations. There were the usual jokes about Skynet, which always appear at least once in any serious consideration of the internet and AI. And at least three speakers, who had never met before, referenced the story of Narcissus as a central parable for our online world – two of them including the same Caravaggio painting in their slide decks. As you’ll recall, in the ancient Greek myth, Narcissus is a young man so beautiful that seeing his reflection in a pond, falls in love with it. Transfixed by the sight of himself, unable to move, he eventually vanishes, becoming the narcissus flower. Echo is a young woman who loves him, but is only able to watch from afar and can only repeate the words he says, without ever being able to touch him. Eventually Echo vanishes, too, and just becomes a voice from the hills that repeats anything that is yelled at her. Finding insights on digital technology by recalling symbolism, myth and philosophy proved very useful in trying to get perspective and meaning in what seems to be a perpetual technological onslaught. If we are to get to grips with an information tech that is earthquaking through every aspect of our lives, it’s going to require some deep thinking and deep discussion – and maybe a bit of chilling out with some ASMR.
AT LEAST THREE SPEAKERS REFERENCED THE STORY OF NARCISSUS AS A CENTRAL PARABLE FOR OUR ONLINEWORLD
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