Oddly Satisfying

Oddly Satisfying presents a series of audiovisual and performance works by artists who work with video as a physical material. The artists in this series incorporate hand-drawn animation, practical special effects, alternative game controllers, and the materiality of the video signal itself to emphasize embodied perception. 

“Oddly satisfying” is a label given to viral looping videos that somehow feel tangible to the viewer. They often depict a brief moment of physical or simulated material interaction, usually resulting in a patterned or smooth gradient of visible transformation: one object perfectly fitting into another, an everyday object being crushed by a hydraulic press, or a soft material being extruded through a grid. Oddly satisfying videos are symbiotic with social media, eliciting haptic sensory perceptions that compete with the animated flow of the operating system, slowing users down to increase post engagement metrics like dwell time. 
One of the basic practices of video art is to intervene in the delivery of a signal, either through physical manipulation of the equipment or by introducing forms of audience participation that allow the hands-on transformations of audiovisual objects. Nam June Paik famously placed a large horseshoe magnet on top of a television to bend the electromagnetic field around the cathode-ray tube, providing a literal handle for twisting the picture. 

Physical image manipulation gestures are now built into everyday communication technologies: smartphone users rub their thumbs across glass displays to slide streams of images that glide like air hockey pucks. The artists presented in this series recognize that physical participation is the basic condition of experiencing media today and they respond by calling attention to the person holding their phone instead of absorbing perception into the screen.

Curated by Allen Riley, 2025 Curator-in-Residence