[Alice Penner]

Woah, what a great brief! I’m already so excited to begin. Before I get ahead of myself let me recap. As the title implies, this brief is about craft and process, about making, and about making well. It’s about producing something with care and precision, it’s about the idea but also about the beautiful end product. But making something well-crafted doesn’t have to be necessarily product design, as I originally thought. I can be print, typography, web based or filmic. In fact, in light of the latest project I did, which was making a physical clock, I’d like to steer away from thinking about the outcome in terms of its physical properties for now. I want to try to push myself to express my concept in different forms. At the end of this year I’d like to be able to present clever ideas concretised in a range of different formats, given validity by the strength of their concept rather than driven by their outcome. In particular, I’d like to work in the gaps between different mediums, trying to blur those boundaries. I also want to continue being inspired by things outside of the art & design world, because that’s how my work has the potential to be relevant and hence have an impact. I want to start a conversation between design and scientific data, between art, engineering and philosophy. 

I’d quite like to work with moving image again; I haven’t done so in a while. But not in a traditional sense. Not with actors and props and a typical storyline. If this is the case, it will all be as an add-on, to further the idea I'm trying to get across. I’d like to do something time-based and multidisciplinary. Given my dissertation and all the work I’ve done on sound and avant-garde cinema, I’d like to incorporate that somehow in my practice. I already know it won’t be a commercial piece. But it will be something that will make people pause and think: huh... I hadn’t thought of that. Or at least that’s the goal. I was reading somewhere for my dissertation that a true experimentalist isn’t trying to change the work, but only introduce a shift of perception into an individual viewer. I agree with that. A piece of work is a conversation in that sense, a suggestion made by an artist, a question asked or a simple shared statement. Then it’s up to the viewer to pick up on it or not, depending on their context. Sometimes the viewer and maker are in sync, like to pendulums, in which case a beautiful connection can be born. At other times, they are just to far apart in their mind-spaces. Just a question of bad timing. 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9BIYV3BLcno

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=60P6DJLjXVU&t=347s

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eHn72XVbvu0&t=50s

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=57hJn-nkKSA&t=67s

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dC3Op9zUEig

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q_jzsjQ5ygs

Anyhow, here are some initial inspirations. I notice how all of these have very specific camerawork techniques. Maybe I will have to develop one of my own. I definitely know I want to do something interesting with the soundtrack though. I’m just afraid that I’m already thinking too much about the format and outcome rather than starting from an initial concept that I want to put across, which will put into perspective all the making choices I have. 

I know i’d like to use data and information collected from the environment. I’ve been thinking of recording lights out of my window, in the windows across of the road, and watching them flicker. I don’t know why yet, but it fascinates me. The on and offs of the lights are a sequence, a code, like morse, or just electronic signals of 1s and 0s. What could i use that for?

I also read something today that related to an idea I was really fascinated by as a child. It is the psychological phenomenon called event boundary effect, and it happens to us when we move from an environment to an other, for example by walking through a door. In these situations, it often happens that we forget what we are looking for or what we are doing. This is because the mind tends to compartmentalise our memories and thoughts, and with changing boundaries it files them away in a “container”. I’m not sure how this relates to balance yet. The only link i can think of at the moment is the balance between past and future, but it might be a weak one, however open to interpretation it is. In any case, I’ve always been interested in this idea of memory, always having had a horrible mnemonic abilities myself. Sometimes I feel like I’m a different person remembering things that other people have told me i did. For all i know, I’ve been sitting writing this blog post since I’ve been born. (ok maybe that’s an exaggeration, but you get my point). 

Anyway, I want to make a film. I’ve been influenced by the structuralist filmmakers I’ve been reading about. They make films that are self aware, that don’t hide their medium, they embrace it and deconstruct it, trying to get to the essence of narrative and storytelling. That’s what i want to do. I want to tell a story in a thousand different ways and manipulate the audience. Create an illusion and shatter it, like the structuralists. I want to embrace the science of light and sound, of process and material. I want to embrace the harmony, the beauty and the magic of the art form. But how?

There is always this idea of balance that bugs me. Maybe I’m just trying to fit a square peg in a round hole (that’s what people say right?). Maybe i just need to break it down and start from there. What is balance? A contrast, a conflict. But also a harmony. Complementary things, different but bound together. A relationship. Or two equal things, in weight on a scale. Things that are worth the exact same. A balance is also when you have a bit of two things, without indulging in one too much. A balanced diet. It is also a state of tension. Of alertness, a moment to capture. A heightened moment of dramatic tension. It is perfection, but it is fleeting. Balance is a fleeting moment of beauty. It speaks to the soul yet it is tragic in its rarity. Alain de Botton wrote in my favourite book that it is almost impossible to find something beautiful without finding it moving, and a little sad. Thats because, in that moment, we realise how rare it is. That’s a balance too. Of happiness and sadness, of beauty and tragedy. There is not one without the other, like light and dark. There is no beauty if there is no ugly. Yin and yang. A balance is also necessity therefore, to have one to have the other. It’s a state of desperate need for one’s opposite to exist. 

My initial design for the clock was based on the way spatial neglect patients draw it when they are asked to represent the time. They squeeze all the numbers on one size due to their lack of attention to the stroke-affected side, unknowingly leaving a big white space. In wanting to design a clock that would enable the patients to read the time easily, I set out to create a working physical copy of their representation of the clock. To do this one thing was necessary: to slow down the clock mechanism to exactly half the speed. Through my research, I found out this could be done in one of two ways: either by altering the mechanical gear chain inside the motor, or by rewiring the electronic component of the quartz mechanism, neither of which turned out to be particularly easy for a beginner like myself. Nevertheless, I learned the basics of gear engineering and figured out the math, also with the help of an Masters Mechanical Engineer from Imperial University. 

The solution to the problem turned out to be theoretically quite simple, but practically almost impossible. I just needed to find a single gear, double to diameter of the driving gear of the motor, which had the same size but double the amount of teeth. By inserting that into the gear chain, it would force the whole thing to slow down by half. After having bought and tested 58 different gears off the internet, the possibility of finding a gear that was as small and as specific as I needed faded away quickly. I considered 3d printing, but that wouldn’t have worked because of the insanely minute scale of what I needed to produce. On top of that, I would’ve had to produce another contained for the gear mechanism that accommodated for the insertion of the new piece. 

So I moved onto my second option, which was electronic. Having been learning about Arduino’s in the last few weeks I was excited to test something out but, still in conversation with my engineering expert, I soon realised that, even if the software and code was correct, it would have been difficult to produce the clock as a standalone object, disconnected from the computed software. This would’ve have prevented it from being hung, which ultimately defeats the purpose of having a clock and of the project altogether. So that didn’t work either. 

 These problems had arisen from the initial design choices I’d made almost instinctively, so I decided to go back and revise. Eventually I came up with some new ideas, one of which seemed more promising. 

I decided to think of the clock in terms of its most basic components, re-thinking how it could work. Instead of having the hands move, could I have the numbers move instead? In this way, the hand could remain fixed on one side, the numbers moving around it, making it always visible for stroke victims with spatial neglect.  

This direction would enable me to still use the quartz mechanism I had without having to spend all my remaining time learning a new skill (while this would have been great and surely useful in the future, it really worried me in terms of achieving an appropriately finished outcome). I swapped each of the hands on the rotating central rod of the mechanism with three separate discs. These would rotate at the same speed of the hands, but they would indicated the numbers instead. 

I first cut a prototype out of mount board, just to figure out how everything would work together and how I should lay out the numbers. I quickly used some Letraset transfers I had lying around. 

Everything seemed to be working okay, except, since it wasn’t cut too precisely,  the discs were touching in parts creating friction and altering the speed. I thought that maybe my material choice was unsuitable, so the next day I tried cutting up some plastic to see if that was more rigid. 

Although the rigidity worked better, the material was just too heavy for the relatively weak mechanism. The motor wasn’t able to turn it, especially when upright. So I went back to mountboard, but this time decided to try laser cutting the shapes to have them fit the rod perfectly and not move around. I digitised my design and put it into a suitable Illustrator file for the machine to be able to process. I was worried that given the thickness of the material and the detail of the shapes I’d drawn, it wouldn’t work. Thankfully, I was wrong. 

I’ve been in contact with Dr. Peii Chen, a specialist at the Kessler Foundation, on the right in the video above. This is a little introduction to the amazing work she does alongside her colleagues in treating neurological conditions like spatial neglect and its rehabilitation. She’s in the photo below holding prism adaptation glasses, a common tool used in treating neglect. 

This is the link to there profile: https://kesslerfoundation.org/aboutus/Peii%20Chen

“Trained as an experimental cognitive psychologist, Dr. Chen started out her postdoctoral career in 2007 and became a neurorehabilitation scientist with the focus on spatial cognition and its disorders after brain injury, especially stroke.  Motivated by first-hand working experience with brain injury survivors and their family members, she gradually expanded her work to patient-centered rehabilitation outcome and to advocating for better rehabilitation healthcare and family caregiver support.  

Most of Dr. Chen's work is focused on spatial neglect. Spatial neglect and its related disorders provide great insights to the understanding of spatial cognition and its underlying neural networks. A person may manifest attentional and/or intentional neglect, egocentric and/or allocentric neglect, in various spatial sectors including on or around one's body (personal space), within arm's reach (peri-personal space) and beyond arm's reach (extra-personal space). Since spatial neglect is so complicated, there is no single treatment that can effectively ameliorate every symptom. In everyday life, spatial neglect is disabling the patient and can be very frustrating for the caregiver. A brain injury, stroke or traumatic brain injury, is a continuous long-term condition having tremendous impact on the personal life as well as the society. She is devoting her career to the study of spatial neglect, its related disorders, and its related inter-personal consequences such as family caregivers' burden and stress.”

For more about the condition: https://kesslerfoundation.org/researchcenter/stroke/networkforspatialneglect.php

My first correspondence and explanation of the project: 

Reynold Brown is his name, and Hollywood poster paintings from the 1950s-60s was his game. Although he passed away in 1991, there are many who would’ve thought him long gone by then, having disappeared from the commercial art world in 1979. In that year the artist suffered a terrible stroke to the right side of his brain, leaving him with many severe symptoms including hemispatial neglect. The following is an extract from the book Neurological Disorders in Famous Artists, by Julien Bogousslavsky & M. G. Hennerici:

Great documentary about Reynold Brown by Mel Bucklin, entitled “The Man Who Drew Bug-Eyed Monsters” (1994)

“... that’s why studios used him, he captured something that they didn’t even have... He captures his own imagination and then puts it onto paper.” - Joe Smith, Illustrator

Journal Neurol Neurosurg Psychiatry 2010 81: 1280-1287

doi: 10.1136/jnnp.2008.171348