spherical video projection in Mozilla Hubs, loop, approx. 3 minutes 30 seconds, mono
Terms of Service is about censorship on the Internet, the vulnerability of digital intimacy and closeness, and the influence of misogynous trolls. The A / V installation is shown in a virtual exhibition. The work shows floating, undifferentiated, detailed images of human skin in a spherical projection surface. At irregular intervals the image is interrupted by abrupt cuts to other areas of the skin and the sound of breathing in the ASMR style. The essential parts of the sound track and a clear picture are kept by the viewer: inside, consciously denied.
"The skin is always present as a characteristic that creates a person’s identity. It smells and tastes, is elastic and adaptable, soft and intimate – an omnipresent and yet underestimated organ of the body
and its visibility since time immemorial, a topic of cultural debates. Thanks to the internet, the closeness between producer and recipient is of central importance, especially in times of global curfews.
The range of videos falling under the category ASMR is wide-ranging, the approaches to create a feeling of closeness in the recipients are correspondingly different. It ranges from pure concentration on the audio track to staged role plays where the visual level is also important.
The circumstances and motives can be quite different, but ASMR (autonomous sensory meridian response) is often about triggering the recipient in a special feeling of well-being, or stimulating the goosebumps-like experience of tingles. The sometimes erotic content leads to misinterpretation and incomprehension on the part of the viewer.
The approaches are very different.
The consequences are therefore all the more serious if supposedly sexually offensive content is denounced by a corporate lobby and leads to the deletion of accounts, which in many cases represent an important source of income for the content creators. Those subcultural phenomena like otherkin come into conflict with an apparently right-wing conservative and often right-wing radical community on the Internet. So-called incels (involuntarily celibates), but also trolls, are antagonists of that group of often male users who oppose any deviating forms of subcultural phenomena on the internet and appear in the form of regular omissions on imageboards such as 4chan through anonymous postings. This anonymous mass of incels feels betrayed and at the same time confirmed by the welfare of others and empowers themselves to judge content creators from ASMR and to humiliate them by means of body or slut shaming.
In Manuel Cyrill Bachinger’s work, intimacy and the haunting experience of closeness are alluded to by means of detailed shots of skin.
However, in allusion to the silenced ASMR community, viewers are deliberately denied essential parts of the soundtrack." Lukas Brunner
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I5maET7ytLU