WE – Preliminary Study is a digital film shown for the first time in the frame of the project GRAN FINALE. WE – Preliminary Study is part of WE, a broad audio-video project about intersubjective relations between human and non-human agents. Just like Iconic Film, WE deals with the topic of sensory experience, but from a different perspective. Whereas in Iconic Film the viewers find themselves actively immersed in an unusual perceptual visual experience, in WE the viewer is “invited” to actually experience. This is done through the use of language, which for its own nature deletes sensory, phenomenal experience.
The elements that constitute the film are reduced to bare minimum: a black and a white photogram and a robotic voice.
Thanks to a synchronicity between voice and photograms, the film starts “talking”. But this tautology quickly breaks, and the voice and the photograms start un-synching: the film no longer talks, only light and darkness alternate while a robotic voice keeps repeating a fragmented mantra. In such circumstances, what is the public looking at and what is the role of this voice?

WE is a broad project that delves into the topic of intersubjective relation, building a bridge between experimental cinema and neuroaesthetics, in a different way compared to that of the embodied cognition. In WE there are no actors, bodies or camera movements. It is a “disembodied” cinema. With this project Numero Cromatico opens to the study of the dynamics and essential grammar of experimental cinema, in which lines, symmetries and rhythms are confronted with psychological processes that underlie both low- and high-level mechanisms such as empathy, identification, distinction between the self and the other.