UvA: Ways of Sensing - Experiments in Phenomenology

Taking the standardized uses of a movie theater as a point of departure, we invite you to join us as we take a journey through the lesser-exposed possibilities of collective viewing. Our program, which combines various short screenings with activities, interactive elements, and alternative sensory experiences, is an experiment in how we can use, reinterpret, and transform the cinematic apparatus.

The bodily experience of ‘sitting through a movie’ isn’t the only way to engage the moving image: these rules are constructed as much as the rooms they’re observed in. The shorts in this program explore themes from a city soundscape to an itch you just can’t scratch, each suggesting different ways of sensing the cinematic world while living and moving through it.

Unexpected

Some of these are native to film in unexpected ways: silent movie theatres were never really silent, and the traditions of group meditation, reaction, and spectacle reach back as far as the Vaudeville days. Ways of Sensing hopes to bring these experiences to the foreground: through sight, sound, texture, and participatory intervention, we invite you to join us in creating cinema that you can touch, feel, and speak back to.