Franziska Bork-Petersen & Louise Yung Nielsen

Sleeping and sensing digital bodies 
The aesthetics of platformed corporeality 

New media entail new facets of staging, maintaining and viewing the body. Our talk explores this by looking into the aesthetics and politics of digital bodies on platforms such as Youtube, Twitch and Instagram. We focus on these bodies’ interaction with and intriguing capacity to affect their audiences. In our first case, we present sleep streaming, formats in which individuals broadcast footage of their sleep to online audiences in real-time. In our second case, we concern ourselves with short-form videos described as oddly satisfying. This type of content evokes unexpected pleasure in viewers through its featuring of multisensory stimuli, such as perfectly fitting objects, mesmerising paint mixing and contrasting textures.

In our talk, we investigate how these videos introduce new modes of ‘embodied spectatorship’ and sensory-driven consumption. Our analytical approach to the videos is inductive; we take the videos as our starting point and conduct close-readings and aesthetic analyses of the selected content. Finally, we discuss how sleep streams and oddly satisfying content negotiate existing notions of labour and gender, and how platform politics contribute to shaping the seemingly apolitical content.

BIO
Franziska Bork-Petersen is associate professor in Performance Studies at University of Copenhagen. Her latest book, Body Utopianism: Prosthetic Being Between Enhancement and Estrangement (Palgrave Studies in Utopianism, 2022), explores the paradoxical relationship between bodies and utopianism. Franziska’s scholarship on corporeality, performance, fashion, dance, and digital bodies has been published in Performance Research, Nordic Theatre Studies, and MedieKultur: Journal of Media and Communication Research. 

Louise Yung Nielsen is Associate Professor and researcher in digital media at Roskilde University. Louise works at the intersection of labour, embodiment, culture and platform economies. She is particularly interested in digital bodies, how they materialise, perform, and become. Louise’s publications have featured in MedieKultur, Journal of Media and Communication Research, Nordic Journal of Media Studies, and Conjunctions: Transdisciplinary Journal of Cultural Participation. 

Æstetisk Seminar er tilrettelagt af AIIM – Centre for Aesthetics of AI Images, Lotte Philipsen og Mette-Marie Zacher Sørensen, Institut for Kommunikation og Kultur, Aarhus Universitet.