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The Eyewriter
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The Eyewriter

2011 · EN · STATUS: [ STREAMING ]

Tony Quan, known in the Los Angeles graffiti world as Tempt1, was one of the most respected writers of his generation before ALS left him almost completely paralyzed, able to move only his eyes. This short documentary follows the hackers, programmers, and artists of the Free Art and Technology Lab and Graffiti Research Lab as they build him a way back into his art: a pair of glasses rigged with a low-cost eye-tracking camera and open-source software that turns eye movement into drawn lines on a screen. Interviews with the developers explain how they scavenged cheap hardware and wrote the tracking code from scratch, while footage of Quan using the finished Eyewriter shows tags and shapes forming letter by letter, watched over by his family. The film stays close to the workshop process, the failed prototypes and small breakthroughs, rather than dramatizing the illness itself. It ends with Quan's work projected large on a building wall, drawn entirely with his eyes.