ASMR

Jurassic Coast, Lyme Regis UK- about what I do. 
My ASMR Channel
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I've written previously that ASMR functions as an important mode of public intimacy in answer to the poverty of compassion in healthcare (and other public areas). 
But what started as sharing books and coffee has slowly transformed into sharing life-artifacts: videos about happenings and thinking and living. 
It's really a process that's never complete: the evolving means of the transfer of energy from one life to another. While each video is a singular artifact, making them all together has become my preferred way of thinking and processing the world. 
Instead of being frozen by making "THE" artifact- the essay, the book, or even a one true statement- I make lots of things in the moment that wash up on the digital beach, refreshed each week when the tide comes in and out. Together, they leave a record of what it's like to live at this time, in all these ways. In the scale of Earth's timeline (as far as I perceive), I'm mostly always dead. So it's as vague and important as that.
In general, I believe/hope future cultural consciousness will temper prioritization of abstract understanding of singular objects "the things" with the wholeness of ecology. It's my deep resistance to creating "the thing" that is also behind my awkward relationship with institutions and art-making. (Like making a film for a festival or writing a thesis for a degree). (I'm not institution-phobic; I just think the nature of obvious existing ones is awkward for how I am.)
((though I do like attending a film festival very much.)) 
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ASMR is all kinds of things, not just what I do. Some content is nonverbal, or theatrical, or other subgenre-specific, and it's growing and turning into other things- but it is, in general, intimate and ext/int/erior. This private/public nature is what's allowed me to do it, so ASMR is the container I've somehow felt okay with expressing myself into, and it's changing me as I do it. 
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If there is broad fatigue at the state of the unkempt algorithmic lands (1. Perry) and the ghastly amount of people "sharing their opinions online"- from baristas to business owners to paranoid basement dwellers, then certainly some sense of meaninglessness is bound to creep into what I do as somebody who makes video artifacts.   ​
There are clearly so many other people making videos and posting their thoughts that I could wind up not creating at all if I didn't see this landscape as a diverse, self-maintaining system. There is a risk of  comparison with others and the fear of that there's some scarce amount of "space" that is being "filled" and that I won't have the desired numerical success that accompanies filling it "successfully".
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But I remember that each time I've been to the Jurassic Coast, I've exclaimed at the sheer daily abundance of fossils scattered on the ground and lodged in rocks for people to simply pick up and take home. Thinking that they must be rare indeed (maybe in the scale of deep-time, they are, ((mostly always dead)), I consulted the book "All about- The Jurassic Coast" by Robert Westwood where I learned that the creatures behind these particular fossils lived between two large mass extinctions, in a special slice of time where they flourished and died out. He says, and I remember,
"Since the sea will only eventually wash them away, we are encouraged to search the shoreline for them."
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Likewise, I set up camp on YouTube and upload my videos as part of my thinking and being process-  artifacting myself as a way to resist the non-compassion of the world and the rules of institutions because I am deeply compelled to be fossilized. I am thus declaring my own importance- not to transcend, but to simply be in the record of time, with others, belonging.
This assertion of the basic right of living and creative energy expenditure happens most vehemently when it is denied by a non-compassionate, instrumental, and rent-based society, which is an affront to life's systems and beauty. 
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I guess down to the raw basics, in the brief moment that I am miraculously not dead in, I give myself the ultimate honor of living and dying. That's ASMR and all else I do. 

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(1) I have had wonderful conversations with Savannah Perry, M.A. Computational Arts, about computers and ecology, and these have given me new ways of thinking about the environments I participate in.