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Our waking experience overflows with small sensations that we almost never verbalise: the feel of pushing a computer key; a brief, satisfying scratch; a word or image rising into consciousness before dissipating. Experience Composite aims to capture those small, abstract moments that otherwise go ignored or quickly disappear. Commissioned in association with the Wellcome Collection, this short film builds on the work of the US psychologist Russell Hurlburt, who in 2006 developed a process called descriptive experience sampling (DES) to document the small moments that make up our inner lives. DES participants wear a small beeper and write down the contents of their experience when it sounds off randomly during the day. Using split-screen image pairings, the UK director Ed Prosser’s experimental short film crafts several ‘beep summaries’ into brief vignettes that both express and expand on these fleeting experiences.
Director: Ed Prosser
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Food and drink
Local tensions simmer amid a potato salad contest at the Czech-Polish border
14 minutes
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Technology and the self
A filmmaker finds a tactile beauty in the creation of her prosthetic leg
11 minutes
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Knowledge
An Indigenous myth and a geological survey elicit two ways of knowing one place
4 minutes
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Technology and the self
How the magic of photography brought Victorian England closer to the spirit realm
16 minutes
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Neuroscience
Dog vision is a trendy topic, but what can we really know about how they see?
11 minutes
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Biology
An elegy for a dying microbe explores what we really mean by ‘death’
9 minutes
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Art
Creating art that was aware of itself – and the viewer – made Manet the first modernist
15 minutes
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War and peace
A century later, can poetry help us make sense of the First World War’s horrors?
9 minutes
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Language and linguistics
The little Peruvian guide to public speaking that conjures up a grandiose world
7 minutes