Emoticons from Patricia Pisters on Vimeo

This video has also been publised and peer reviewed in [in]Transition: Journal of Videographic Film & Moving Image Studies, 2,1, 2015. See for this publication here.

In The Neuro-Image: A Deleuzian Film-Philosophy of Contemporary Screen Culture (2012), I suggest that cinema gives us increasingly intensely direct access to character’s brain worlds. Our audio-visual images co-evolve in resonance with the knowledge we have of principles of the brain and with a philosophical understanding of the complex entanglements between bodies, brains and world.

The short video-experiment Emoticons departs from a common principle studied in affective neuroscience that facial expressions relate to basic affects that are at the core of more complex emotions and feelings. I took these basic emotions as simple guidelines for evoking a memory or an association with each mood. They all include a reference to film and other audio-visual media. Consciousness has become cinematographic consciousness.

This project was originally conceived as a mini-installation consisting of two video-channels. One video shot and projected in a 360⁰ pan, expressing events inside a brain space. The other video of a talking head projected on a dummy, pronouncing thoughts associated with each basic emotion.

With great thanks to filmmakers Igor Kramer and Pepijn Schroeijers to suggest transforming some theory into practice and to help create a ‘neuro-image’ of my brain.  

Below a photo impression of the double channel video installation-version of Emoticons. Pepijn Schroeijers, Igor Kramer, Patricia Pisters at SIN (Straattheater Instituut Nederlands, NDSM wharf Amsterdam, May 2014). 

Blue is the warmest color. Egg yolk jelly fish filmed in Monteray Bay Aquarium. Summer sounds of crickets recorded in Crystal Cove, California 2014. This film was screened in the Programme A Taste of Red, Yellow and Blue in EYE Film Institute Netherlands on March 31, 2015. 

On the left or top analogue photos made with a Lomography camera (Diane Mini) and different typse of 35 mm film (black & white, 200 & 800 ASA sometimes with color effect on film stock). On the right or below digital photos made with a Samsung Gallaxy EK-GC 110. Both are simple amateur cameras but they allow investigating some basic differences between analogue and digital. The tags will grow so all To Be Continued. See the first 100 comparisons below.

Talk Soft Cinema is a series of interviews with filmmakers, theorists and critics with interesting ideas about cinema and its future. December 9, 2013

Watch the video on Vimeo

Conference keynote: New Materialisms IV – Movement, Aesthetics, Ontology. May 17, 2013

Watch the video here

De Fascinatie is a series of programs that present academics of the Universiteit van Amsterdam. In several hypotheses they talk about their fascination for their field of research. 

Bekijk de video op UvAkanaal