Steven Eastwood and The Neurocultures Collective’s collaboration, initiated through the five-year research project Autism Through Cinema, sought to reimagine moving image production through non-extractive methods of co-creation across roles, experience, and relations. The group’s collective research into traditions of cinema, and the making of moving images, helped to identify formal rhythms, and representational (in)consistencies of Autistic and neurodivergent experiences that traverse filmic scenes, genres, casts, and screenings. Principally, the group took note of the crude taxonomy of gestures that served to flatly characterize Autistic ways of being in the cinematic world—think of Dustin Hoffman playing the genius, savant in Rain Man (1988); or the compulsive behaviours of Sean Penn’s character depicted in i am sam (2001).11Steven Eastwood, Bonnie Evans, Sebastian Gaigg, Janet Harbord & Damian Milton, “Autism through cinema: co-creation and the unmaking of knowledge”, International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education 38:5 (2025), 674, DOI:10.1080/09518398.2022.2025492.  

Much like the common creative writing feedback, “show, don’t tell,” cinema relies on gesture to do its significant communicative work. In this way, language—which is, to a degree, already restrictive and exclusionary—is denoted not merely through words, but through the punctuation of onscreen gesture. In this shift, a new form of embodied “vocabulary” is established to condition viewers’ comprehension through an apparatus of formal tropes (i.e.: camera placement and framing, referential performances, and sonic accompaniment) to transport audiences into specific felt registers and attitudes.22Ibid, 674-675. 

Through the collective study convened by Steven Eastwood and Janet Harbord at Queen Mary University of London, respondents devised a new grammar through which moving images may, subversively, assemble intimate depictions of Autistic ways of being in the world. In forming “new vocabularies, without abandoning the old vocabularies,”33This phrasing is sampled from previous Blackwood contributor Macarena Gomez-Barris’ open invitation to engage in terminological terraforming; a way of generating space for new articulations of being in the world to emerge from the unsettling of normative attachments, and implementation of alternative, and expansive language(s). Macarena Gomez-Barris, Political Concepts: Tidalectics, lecture delivered at the Cogut Institute for the Humanities at Brown University, March 8, 2024. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lgrt9YoHGuU. the Collective worked to dissolve attachments to normative expectations, and to form the cinematic world anew through performances infused with their own intimacies and experiences.  

In cinematic representation and clinical neurology, gesture operates as optical allusion/illusion: body language to subliminally convey a subject’s understanding of social cues. For instance, one’s ability to read when to slip into a conversation. From a clinical standpoint, these gestures and “social competencies” inform a taxonomy of familiar postures that make up normativity. Using these known movements as a guide, clinicians may use observed movements to arrive at a diagnosis. In STIM CINEMA, this cursory gaze is mediated by the red, wire-frame overlay of clinical eye-tracking technology, which traces the migration of a sitter’s gaze within a clinical trial to distinguish their purported divergence. Stimming often falls outside the bounds of normativity; cast, not as choreographic forms of attunement, or of jubilant punctuation, but rather an indicator or flare up of (pejorative) difference. Frequently, individuals who are Autistic or neurodivergent assume “masks” to counter-perform the gestural language that is expected from others.44Steven Eastwood and the Neurocultures Collective, STIM CINEMA, at The University of Toronto: Mississauga, Blackwood Gallery, 2025. Rehearsed and restaged time and time again, these performances seek to passably emulate behaviours deemed acceptable in social settings. 

In the excerpt from Steven Eastwood and the Neurocultures Collective’s film: STIM CINEMA, projected in Blackwood Gallery, an unseen voice—presumed to be a voice from the Collective—gives shape to stimming: 

I think all people, not just neurodivergent people, we all have this need to move in a way that is in tune with how we're feeling. And I feel like we've just had this built-in sort of regulation, or sort of rule that we're not allowed to move in a certain way. (…) Self-soothing is a very common thing for neurodivergent people, for neurotypical people, for animals. Dogs spin when they're going to sit down, babies are rocked to sleep because the motion is inherently calming, and we never let go of that. We always are looking for a way to find those repetitive motions that calm us, and I don't think that's a bad thing.55Ibid.

These words resound in the film’s closing moments, as a space for this unbridled exploration of meaning-filled movement is illustrated: a public pool, flushed out and dried up, ready for folks to flow freely on its floor. The Collective’s “stimming pool”66This is also the title of the Collective’s feature film. See https://www.thestimmingpool.com/. carves out a dedicated space outside the prejudicial, normative gaze. Rather than diminishing the recursive movements as turbulent social behaviour, the Collective reframes stimming within a renewed embodied vocabulary. Both a desirable and reliable practice, stimming offers us (both, and all, neurodivergent and neurotypical) the means to metabolize the world, and to celebrate neurodiverse thought and embodiment.