I am collaborating with a group of neurodivergent artists - The Neurocultures Collective - to co-create a feature length film and a multiscreen artwork. The co-creation explores emergent themes around (i) masking and camouflaging of neurodiverse individuals operating in neurotypical environments, (ii) the testing and diagnostic processes associated with autism, (iii) our creatureliness and (iv) the pleasures to be found in stimming, repetition, circularity, and spiralling shapes and movement.

 

An outline has emerged for a film with the working title of The Spiral: a hybrid combination of observational documentary, sensory ethnography, fictional scenes, and the occasional B-Movie twist. The Spiral uses a drifting structure, with ideas nested within ideas. STIM CINEMA will interrogate sequences within The Spiral, creating a multiscreen gallery artwork exploring, across looping video, the relationship between stimming, GIFs, and protocinema zoetropes. The Spiral, and a multiscreen artwork, Stim Cinema are scheduled for production in 2022 (with a cinema release and gallery tour following in 2023).  

 

These productions are a part of the Wellcome Trust funded Autism through Cinema, a major collaborative research project I am working on with Professor Janet Harbord. Visit the main project website here.

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Read the feature article Cinemautism, in Brian Keith Bergen-Aurand (ed.), Screen Bodies (Berghahn, 2016)

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