Owen Kent
A filmmaker and assistive technology designer who has used a wheelchair for thirty-three years and scored this film on a joystick he plays with his lips.
Who is doing the looking
Owen Kent is a filmmaker and assistive technology designer. He grew up in Estes Park, Colorado, studied filmmaking at UC Berkeley, and has used a wheelchair for thirty-three years.
He is a co-founder of Assistive Technology Development, Inc., where he designs open-source assistive hardware and software and releases it for anyone to build on. That work is also this film's subject. His company and Dr. Rory Cooper's laboratory at the University of Pittsburgh are building the robotic wheelchair The Chairs That Move Us follows, and Kent appears in his own film as its narrator and as one of the people building the machine it is about.
He played piano with his hands until a progressive condition took them. He now performs on a lip-operated joystick he designed and gave away, and this film's score is his, composed and played on that instrument. He is at work on an open platform for the chair he drives, on the principle that a wheelchair should not have a date of death.
He lives in Colorado with his dog, Buddy, who also appears.
The architect was always in the building
I have used a wheelchair for thirty-three years. I can move my mouth, my eyes and my voice, and I drive my chair with my chin. I tell you this not so you will admire me but so you will know who is doing the looking, because this film asks you to look hard at an object you have spent your whole life not seeing.
The wheelchair is the most-designed object most people will never look at. Millions pass one every day and the mind files it under medical equipment and stops. But if you live inside one for thirty years, the object stops being an object. It becomes part of how you exist in space. You stop seeing it and you start seeing through it. I want to do for it what Objectified did for the everyday, and what Herzog did when he held a long shot on a glove abandoned in the road: put it down on the table in good light and look at it with the seriousness we save for chairs that cost more and carry less.
There is a second thing I can do from in here, and it took me years to understand it was the same thing. I played piano with my hands. All ten fingers. Then a progressive condition took that, the way a tide takes a beach, and one day the instrument stopped answering. I play with my lips now, on a joystick I designed, running software I wrote, and I gave all of it away. The score of this film is mine, composed and performed on that rig.
The music is not in the film to move you. It is in the film because it is the argument in a form you can hear instead of be told. Everything this film claims, that the people who live inside a machine should be the ones allowed to open it, is a claim I can only make honestly if I have done it to something that mattered. I did it to my own hands.
So this is not a film about being fixed. I am not trying to claw back the function I lost. I am trying to give myself things I never had and then hand them to other people, so that what we gain cannot be repossessed. A tool owned by a company can be taken away. A tool owned by everyone cannot.
I should say plainly that I am inside this in every direction. I narrate the film, I scored it, and my company and Dr. Rory Cooper's laboratory are building the chair it ends on. There is no neutral position available to me, and pretending there was would be the only dishonest thing in here.
The hardest problem left in artificial intelligence is a body moving through a room it has never seen. The disability community has been solving that every morning for fifty years and nobody thought to ask us how. I made this film because the next century of this object is about to be written, and the architect was always in the building. We were just never allowed to hold the pencil.
Owen Kent