Ondine Manfrin is an emerging sound and performance artist working on Gadigal and Wangal land. Ondine explores the algorithmic structures and emotional intimacies of the internet through her ASMR- (Autonomous Sensory Meridian Response) based artistic practice, utilising video, voice, coding, and live durational performance. She draws on the tropes, structures, and sub-genres of ASMR performance throughout her practice to generate conversations about digital spaces, cyber language, and collective healing. Her current Honours project, I Pretend I Do Not See It But In Reality I Do, explores ASMR's potential as a speculative medium, creating a YouTube archive of roleplays set in imagined climate-changed and techno-saturated futures. This ongoing video collection hopes to rupture apathy and doom culture and create redemptive future narratives through sensory intimacy and digital immersion. Ondine has exhibited and performed in Pari Ari, Tributary Projects, Airspace Projects, and AD Space, and had live works commissioned for Pact Salon: Slurp! (2019) And ULTRAVIRUS Festival (2018). Ondine also DJs and hosts a show on FBi Radio 94.5 under her alias Bocconcini, exploring music collected from YouTube recommendation algorithms.

I PRETEND I DO NOT SEE IT BUT IN REALITY I DO

As we increasingly comprehend the outcomes of climate crisis and technological saturation, our illusions of a linear and controllable future are slipping away. Rather than resigning to the apathy and apocalypticism that doom culture thrives on, I Pretend I Do Not See It But In Reality I Do asks if acknowledging this unknowing could unlock redemptive ways of seeing the future that are hopeful, playful, and multiplicitious. Through use of ASMR, this ongoing video collection imagines potential climate crisis and techno-saturation futures through speculative roleplay scenarios. These ASMR roleplays reimagine anxiety-inducing possible futures through acts of care and sensory immediacy, tickling the ears and calming the nerves. Envisioning unforeseeable futures with the care, humour, and empathy of ASMR, this ever-growing YouTube archive attempts to bring light to the unpredictable, and seek visions of the future beyond doom and apocalypse through radical empathy and redemptive possibility.