Stim Cinema

Nottingham Castle announces the premiere of STIM CINEMA – a new touring exhibition and moving image installation exploring repetitive actions and autistic experiences, tracking back to the earliest forms of moving image, and the birth of cinema and cinematic language. STIM CINEMA is part of Nottingham Castle’s season of new programming focusing on Neurodivergence.

STIM CINEMA takes the action of stimming - ‘the practice of physical repetition as a way of taking sensory pleasure in recurrence, or of expressing and alleviating anxiety, and a common trait of autistic experience’ - as its starting point, connecting delight in repetition to the birth of cinema and to the contemporary fascination with GIFS. 

The exhibition begins with a room of zoetropes - early moving image devices - which introduce the concept of the stim or repeated action. This commonality, between stimming, early cinema, and the avant-garde, is the founding principle for STIM CINEMA, the three-screen film installation which follows in the next space. This 16-minute loop explores the hidden and ever stimming details of the everyday world, via a protagonist taking part in an eye tracking test.