Enactive Cinema

Friday 24th October 2008, 4.30-6.00pm, Institute of Creative Technologies, De Montfort University (Leicester) - Enactive Cinema (Pia Tikka)

We are delighted to announce the first seminar of 2008/9 session at the IOCT.

For the first time in this country Finnish filmmaker and researcher Pia Tikka will be showing and talking about her groundbreaking work 'Obsession' at the Institute of Creative Technologies in Leicester on 24th of October. Winner of the Prix Möbius Nordica 2006 for Interactive Storytelling, 'Obsession' is the first wholly biologically-driven film. Obsession uses viewers' physiological data to drive the experience of non-stop story, which continuously generates different views from the main character Emmi's obsessive mental landscape. Enactive cinema involves three factors: moving image, sound and emotion tracking. The emotional dynamics are given their own cinematic role. While following the cinematic narrative, each spectator’s heart rate, breathing and movements are continuously measured by built-in bio-sensors and determines the course of the narrative, constituting an ecological circuit of continuous interaction with the spectator and the narrative space.

See the pdf at http://www.ioct.dmu.ac.uk/projects/enactivecinema.pdf

Her presentation will explore how narrative unfolds, and how rhythm and soundscape emerge, and how this depends on the spectator experiences of the emotional dynamics between characters. Enactive cinema emphasizes unconscious interaction between the cinema spectator and the cinema. Instead of the spectator directly manipulating the narrative, its unfolding is affected by the spectator's emotional participation. The project suggests that unconscious and conscious experience interact in an inseparable and complex manner. The cinema experience is more than seeing and hearing. It is about sensing and re-living of one’s own experience in what happens to the “others” - This is, ENACTIVE CINEMA.

RSVP: Lisa McNicoll ([email protected])