Jake Reber’s ASMR: artificial seductive machine reading [IN TWO IDENTICAL SECTIONS] is a guided meditation through the sensory impressions evoked by holding a book, particularly this pocketbook with its glossy cover. Set in a large monospaced font, the text gives ever-repeating instructions on how to handle the book object and on which sensations the reader should focus, mostly the feeling of the hands. These instructions are repeated and recombined with different sensations, presumably using a permutation algorithm in the writing.

The book makes reference to the genre of ASMR (“Autonomous Sensory Meridian Response”): sounds and videos featuring the sound of touching objects of different textures recorded with high quality microphones, causing some viewers to feel a tingling in the back of the head and spine. ASMR uses the mind to compensate the lack of sensory experience when consuming audiovisual media via personal computers. This is rendered absurd when in Reber’s ASMR the reader is instructed to close their eyes and focus on the sensory impressions of the book, as this makes further reading impossible, reflecting the active role of the reader in perceiving a book.

ASMR contains two identical versions of the same text, differing only in reading speed—the first lasts approximately 8.6 minutes, the second 17.2 minutes as it is meant to be read at half speed, thus further deepening the meditative book experience. In his endorsement, Germán Sierra sees this “conceptual revindication of the book’s physicality in the line of Ulises Carrión’s ‘The New Art of Making Books’” and concludes by recommending “More than ever, handle this book with care” (back cover).

The book was published by Recreational Resources, whose Tumblr site is very reminiscent of Edit Publications’ project 11 Books Expanding Tan Lin’s 7CV and features the slogans “we own nothing / we print everything, this marks the death of the internet,& ;poetry” and “DOCUMENT—DISTRIBUTE—DECONSTRUCT—DESTROY.” All books are available as PDF and POD; the complete program could be downloaded as a ZIP file.