Emotional Screen: Color and Moving Images in Digital Media

Contemporary media display a predominant tendency deriving from the emotional impact of color, in connection with the cultural dissemination of neuroscience and with the new color manipulation possibilities presented by the recent digital turn. On this basis, I seek to examine some of the potential relationships between the area of science and topics on color and emotion, and the tendency of digital cinema to develop color models with a strong visual and sensory impact. This trend implies a model where the cognitive activity of the viewer is focused on engaging his or her entire sensory apparatus and on the centrality of emotional responses. Three examples, taken from media advertising and cinema, show three possible ways of building artificial and self-referential color patterns, which are detached from the standard conditions of conventional vision.