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 invites the audience to take pleasure in discovering hidden movements in every part of the frame, reminding us all of the pleasure we share in seeing actions rock and loop, and revealing that such stimulation is not only common to autistic experience but in the DNA of the moving image.

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. Her curiosity introduces us to the wealth of information in the background of the sequences she is watching. 

The third room considers the co-creation process involved in making STIM CINEMA through visual thinking, the use of mind maps, and the ambition to create new moving image forms.  Props, ephemera, original artworks, and GIF clips offer further insight into the work of the Collective. 

The exhibition encourages the viewer to consider our shared neurodivergence, and to discover stimming as a joyous perceptual and bodily possibility, one which challenges the very notion of normativity and is in fact a desirable state.