Michael Simon Toon

Toon has made two short films in the style of cinéma vérité which are globally recognised as serious inquiries into the nature of life: Toon self-produced Thought Moments (2004) which examines microexpressions by slowing down footage of a wide range of individuals answering seemingly innocuous questions. Toon, a former Buddhist monk, titled Thought Moments after the Buddhist term for the mental states we experience when a physical or mental object enters the mind. The film is part of the British Film Council's library. It is also reproduced as coursework in neurolinguistic programming by students of psychology in several languages across the world. Toon co-produced Protocell Circus (2010). He edited, treated, subtitled and scored footage of protocells synthesised and filmed by Dr. Rachel Armstrong, Senior TED Fellow and then University College London teaching fellow. The film appears in numerous discussions on the origin of life in terms of synthetic biology. It was exhibited in 2010 at Digital Art@Google NYC at the Chelsea Art Museum of Manhattan and at Synth-ethic: Art and Synthetic Biology Exhibition in 2011 at the Natural History Museum of Vienna, Austria.