What does it mean for systems without bodies to learn about pleasure?

The installation draws on footage from genres designed to bypass cognition and speak directly to the nervous system: ASMR recordings, fail compilations, children's content farm videos, and "gooning" videos from communities exploring trance-like states of arousal. Each video has been overlaid and mirrored, transformed into symmetrical, pulsating patterns. Presented floor-to-ceiling in surround sound, the five channels loop at different durations - constantly recombining, the soundtracks merging and colliding.

These genres occupy a strange territory. ASMR was named in 2010 by communities who discovered they shared an unnamed sensation. Gooning culture emerged through forums where people taught each other new techniques for using screens and bodies together. These aren't pre-existing pleasures that platforms learned to exploit - they're forms of experience that emerged through the feedback loop between human desire and algorithmic optimisation. We teach the machine what we like. The machine teaches us new ways to feel. The distinction between authentic pleasure and manufactured craving dissolves.

Made in 2018 during the Elsagate controversy - when content farms were reverse-engineering children's entertainment for algorithmic engagement - the work was responding to dynamics that have since intensified. Generative AI now creates content rather than simply recommending it. The practices explored here have moved into mainstream awareness. As AI systems develop increasingly sophisticated models of human affect, what else might be done with that knowledge?