The view from CHEZ SHHH
Hello, world!
It’s been a good five years since my last newsletter — long enough for me to almost forget that I have one. If you’re not sure who I am, then: *tips fedora* I’m Claire Tolan. I work with whispering and ASMR, in many capacities, as you’ll see below. At the moment, I’m focused on writing, creating audio plays and short videos, and programming platforms for whispers.
But, I did take a break, hence the newsletter’s long hiatus. From 2018 - 2021, I worked on other technology projects. I found my way back to my own work with ASMR and whispering in 2021.
This newsletter is a quick run down of recent and upcoming projects and publications, should you still be out there listening. If you’re wondering why you’ve received this email, I’ve imported subscribers from TinyLetter to Substack ;) In the future, I’ll send updates via this list. If don’t want to receive them, you know what to do (unsubscribe).
UPCOMING
ALICE AND BOB… AS DEVICES
In 2022, I read just about every academic paper that’s ever been published about the whisper and ASMR, across disciplines 🥵 I was thinking about doing a PhD — nope, not yet — but also, it just felt overdue. I will begin publishing writing about the research this year.
I’m starting with an orthogonal approach: several writing projects that consider ALICE AND BOB, the famous couple of cryptography. Alice and Bob belong to a cast of archetypal collaborators and adversaries (Charlie, the courier; Eve, the eavesdropper; Grace, the government agent), and in these works, I play them through various whisper-driven choreographies related to secrecy, gossip, seduction, and intrigue.
My first Alice and Bob work is a pseudo-academic paper-cum-metafiction, “Sibyl’s Primes.” It’s an amateur topological consideration of the whispering throat, the transformations of which trigger strange phenomena, phantoms, chaos. It will be published in 2023 as part of the compendium SIBYL’S MOUTHS by the artist group PURE FICTION in collaboration with Sternberg / MIT Press. Thanks to Luzie Meyer for the invitation.
LULZ, NOON
On 23-24 February 2023, LULZ, NOON, a whispered audio play featuring Alice and Bob, will debut at the Articulating Data Symposium at the Univerity of Edinburgh.
LULZ, NOON is an absurdist western about dysfunctional relationships, typed characters, permissioned environments, control, and communication — an attempt to write Beckett-as-Looney Tunes-as-Band of Outsiders — with a… hacker twist. The symposium brings together academics and practitioners working across information security, literature, design, computer science, and geosciences to consider “machine listening, vocalisation, and the (in)security of language in a digital age.” I’m very happy to take part!
I will also release the play online for listening and reading via a dedicated website. No links yet, but stay tuned. And more is yet to come with Alice and Bob!
BAD BUTCHER NFT
In February or March, I will launch my first NFT platform, BAD BUTCHER, created with my frequent collaborator, artist Camilla Steinum. BAD BUTCHER NFTs will enable holders to access a token-gated ASMR audio play about – what else – a horrifying, sicko, delusional butcher who rages through latent space, slaughtering every image it encounters (heh heh). I am programming a few tricks into the app, which are – hopefully – fun and/or funny. More information to follow.
This project has sent me down a blockchain rabbit hole, yet again, leading to –
CHEZSHHH.ETH
I’ve become convinced it would be fun, edifying, and timely to build a web3 ASMR video & audio platform. I want to experiment with different access protocols, content mobility, and tokenisation opportunities afforded by blockchain, and the progress of projects like LivePeer makes decentralized video streaming more and more interesting. After thinking about this for a month, I’ve generated quite a… plethora of potential product features, which I’m prioritizing and streamlining into a coherent MVP as I write.
I’m going to start by building out a prototype, most likely via Lens Protocol, Polygon, Tableland, LivePeer, and IPFS. I’m currently mapping out a business model and hoping to raise a small amount of funding for a POC that I can use to fund a more sophisticated product.
I will also be attending ETH Denver. Please reach out if you’ll be there! Would love to meet in my favorite city on the plains.
I’ll be sharing more frequent updates about this project on mirror — see you there.
RECENT
CICADA GAMES
In 2021, I created my first AR app, an ASMR spatialised “audio play” about a brood of very special cicadas, who — having spent a millennium underground, suckling tree roots — emerge to find that they are pawns in a legal battle between the muses and the sun. From the tree roots, they’ve absorbed petabytes of human knowledge and activity, which is now compressed in their hollow bodies. They’re commanded by the Earth to undertake suicide-mission space flights to deliver this information to muses imprisoned in hollow planets, who will use it as encryption keys (high entropy of human thought & activity) to circumvent the sun’s surveillance. But the absorption of human information has the unanticipated effect of making the cicadas sentient. They begin to insist that they should have a choice between death on the space flight and death in the summer grass, which, though less glorious, would allow them to play cicada games: singing and mating. (… This was definitely a pandemic project…)
The app was produced by czirp czirp with art direction by Milena Georgieva and German translation and voice by Luzie Meyer. Programming etc by moi in Flutter and Unity. It’s still available on iOS and Android.
I hope to eventually mix and release the audio as its own project, outside of the app. I can’t tell you how many hours of cicada field recordings I have. Let’s see!
SOOTHER
In 2021, I also prototyped an AI ASMRtist, SOOTHER, a whispering, role-playing voice companion. Documentation is here.
I’m on the fence about whether an AI ASMRtist is a good entertainment experience, for reasons that I partially detail in the docs. The concept is still pawing at me, especially with ChatGPT, and last year, I rebuilt half of the prototype to make some necessary changes before surrendering myself to more pressing tasks. I have the feeling that the experience could become very wild, which makes me want to continue. And maybe — scrapped for parts — SOOTHER will be integrated into future projects. It was very cool to learn about different speech synthesis systems and conversational AI, and to train the whisper, though — nearly 2 years later — my vocal cords have not yet recovered from the 100 hours of whispering I did to create the training data.
“SOCIALS”
FINALLY, I’ve returned to Twitter after many years away. Experimentally, I’m primarily using my account to publish short ASMR videos about crypto and tech horror: fraud, scams, hacks, heists, lawsuits, amnesia, what have you — series name, length, etc tba. It’s a bit like having a radio show again, except slower motion.
I created the first video during those heady days of November before SBF had been called to task by the Southern District of New York:
And more are on the way, the next one about botched napkin magic tricks and rug pulls with extreme influence from the cocktail napkin hall of fame and Daisies (incidentally, quite the whisper-driven film):
When you’re cleaning up your messes, just remember: “If we’re good and hard-working, we’ll be happy…”
I will archive all videos on YouTube.
You can reach me and find occasional updates via my studio website. A small and incomplete project archive from the past decade is on my personal website for the curious. And per usual, I’m reluctantly, kind of, semi-anonymously on instagram.
Thank you for reading, and wishing you a peaceful 2023,
CLAIRE TOLAN