ASMR-audio installation, voice by Genevieve Costello
Braided wire, supra-aural headphone, diy passive electrodes (T3, C3, Cz, C4, T4, T5, P3, Pz, P4, T6), sheep skin, tripod, prototype experimental board, female connector, male connector, wireless receiver, single-board computer, beads, shrink-on tube, vermiculite, audio (15min)
2018

Splitting Defense is a mixed media artwork, comprising an audio narrative embedded within a physical installation. It places the recipient into the realm of a future society, remembering the horrors of the present. While evoking a languorous sense of belonging to the future, it casts an eerie light on current practices of feeling, empathising, caring, ignoring, and dividing. The artwork thus playfully engages topics such as gendered patterns of valuing and devaluing phenomena of emotional labour.
Just as capitalism cannot simultaneously account for the presence of production of value and the reproductive practices which sustain it, splitting defense points to a consciousness unable to account for a contradiction. The term consequently can be read as “defense through splitting” and “defense from splitting”.
The narrative tries to entangle the temporal positions of social analysis, utopian speculation, and immediate experience. It selectively foregrounds the recipient’s body through ASMR effects. There is a pervasive lust for the creation of entanglements, for intertwining and confronting seemingly disaffected analysis with the immediacy of corporeal experience.