Toward a Minor Tech:Menotti-500

Moving Textures

Gabriel Menotti

So-called poor media has a wealth of its own. TikTok choreographies and ASMR voiceovers win at the attention economy also because they achieve affective responses disproportionate to their modest (re)production requirements. There isn’t much to see, and it rarely matters what is being said. Through localized – and rather specific – stimuli, these and other kinds of oddly satisfying content overpower the available sensoria.

What could otherwise be taken as a formal deficit is at the core of this hypnotic potential. As a minor genre sitting at the fringes of commercial entertainment, oddly satisfying media seems to capitalize on the singular qualities of the textural. Textures, as once defined by Eve Segdwick, constitute “an array of perceptual data […] whose degree of organization hovers just below the level of shape or structure” (2003, 16). This structural insufficiency may lead to a short-circuiting of perception that supplies the feeling of physical properties not immediately present or represented. As one probably knows, particularly textural sights and sounds are often said to unfold through the sense of touch. Textures, in that regard, bear some sort of synesthetic density.

This large capacity for sensorial excitement makes textures instrumental for the aesthetic economy of digital media. As an actual component of digital assets, textures underpin hyperrealism and special effects alike, conveying high-fidelity sensation with little transmission of information.

The textural character of oddly satisfying media becomes evident in their propensity towards kinetic abstraction. Any meaning they may express is of little relevance and often interchangeable by any other. The logic under which they operate is above all phatic: more than signals to be decoded, oddly satisfying media propagates (like) frequencies to be vibed with. Transduction, rather than communication, is the name of this game. External references become subsumed under the pure concatenation of internal motion. By way of cognitive arrest and compulsion, moving textures integrate bodies into the otherwise incommensurable workings of media technologies, facilitating our couplings with the machine.

What follows feels like the surrender of agency. As consumption habits make one increasingly readable to the system, knowing subject and knowable object trade positions. Mesmerizing stimuli take the self out for a ride. Hi-octane fuel for late night doomscrolling: within the prosaic realities of social media, moving textures supplement the perverse incentives of the newsfeed. The latter infamously revolves like a slot machine, keeping us hooked with the deferred promise of a dopamine rush. The former, meanwhile, spins like secular praying wheels, inciting gleeful resignation.

Together, the newsfeed and moving textures seem to co-operate for the production of persistent network effects. An electronic babysitter for the disaffected of any age, playing its part in the disintegration of public spheres as it substitutes meaningful exchanges by a diffuse atmosphere of amorphous comfort - clogging the wires while transmuting people into views, likes, and subscribers.

A dreamachine (Gareth Spor, Wikimedia Commons, 2008).