I’ve always thought it a good idea to try to see the world through someone else’s eyes, but perhaps misappropriating Alex Schady’s glasses during our collaborative making workshop wasn’t the best way to go about it, although I’d love to see the world the way he does! I imagine that it would be a lot like the experience I had in the Apple Store the other day when I accompanied my daughter who was buying a new laptop. Whilst she was doing her thing, I wandered over to the table with the futuristic looking Vision Pro headsets. Did I have time for a demo? Hell, yeah!

Apparently someone very technically minded in a back room somewhere was building my device for me based on my head size and glasses prescription, and then out it came ceremoniously offered up on a velvet cushion for my delight. Well, an hour later, having held a butterfly on my hand, walked with a tightrope walker across a ravine, ducked to avoid the flick of a dinosaur tail and had VIP access to a Metallica concert, I rather reluctantly removed ‘my precious’ and handed it back. My cheeks hurt through the stupid grin which must have been plastered all over my face. According to my daughter, I had turned into a child and had been making quite a lot of noise which had attracted quite a lot of attention. All the way home I was considering what I might sell to raise enough money to buy one. But then reality set in; I’d never go out of the house again, and would be destined always to watch films by myself (hang on, is that such a bad thing?). But it turns out that it’s had some mixed reviews, and so I resolved that I could spend the money I had saved by going on a nice holiday, and try to get my hands on one of Alex Schady’s spare pairs of glasses instead – he has quite a few apparently because he keeps on losing them. I wonder if he ever walks past someone and thinks, those glasses look familiar.

Until then I’ll have to make do with his fascination with holes. All sorts of holes; sink holes, caves, the holes the Road Runner used to fall down, black holes, white holes. He explained that the thing about holes is that they are defined by what is around them rather than the hole itself. Thinking about it, generally speaking, a hole is the void where something used to be. I have a hole somewhere inside me. I don’t know what used to be there, but I find myself trying to fill it with food, rubbish food, even when I’m not hungry and particularly when I’m bored. The thing is, I know that it’s a hole incapable of being filled, and that I’m not doing myself any favours in terms of my health whilst I engage in such a fruitless activity, but, nevertheless, still I try. I once told a counsellor, who was helping my daughter with her needle phobia, that I thought that my brain was trying to kill me. I could see the pound signs light up in his eyes.

So, Alex got us to cut holes in some card and took us off into the outside world where we stopped still, on his bell, and focussed on what we could see through our differently shaped holes; a lot of perplexed passersby and the fruit and vegetable section of Waitrose. It became something close to a performance, and I half expected some members of the public to whip out their cardboard holes and join us. It’s interesting how masking the extraneous can make you notice more details which perhaps you wouldn’t notice in the round. I found myself slightly adjusting my hole so what I could see through it became more compositionally pleasing.

Then it was back indoors where our holes were repurposed by being joined together to form a circle and painted black. We then had to make something which would move inside the holes as Alex filmed them from the inside using a small turntable.

I forgot to photograph my piece which was a circular piece of card with tissue paper and a length of finger-knitting glued onto it in a spiral to represent my oesophagus, which I was going to spin around on a pencil. A strange choice, I agree, but I had just been talking to Zoë (to whom I owe thanks for allowing the use of her photos from the day) about recently having had an endoscopy. I’d been experiencing a sensation of having a lump in my throat for a while, and Dr Google had diagnosed it as being globus, which is a common side effect of reflux, but the GP didn’t necessarily agree and decided, in light of my family history of oesophageal cancer, that it was better to be safe than sorry. I told them to give me all the drugs they had, and all went fine (turns out I have a hiatus hernia) although I do remember seeing inside myself at one point which was ever so slightly weird. Zoë and I agreed that I should get hold of the images by making a data access request to see if I can use them in my work.

The last activity of the day was to make a cardboard structure which was to have a phone at one end and, at the other end, an image with a hole cut out of it. The trick was to get the distance between the two just right so that neither the image nor what could be seen through it would be out of focus, which proved to be quite difficult. We then went out onto the roof and did some filming for one minute. I filmed using one continuous take – it didn’t really cross my mind to pause and change focus. Thinking about it now, this meant that the decisions I made as to where to go next were determined solely by what I could see through the camera and not by extraneous influences. Rather than moving from left to right, I think, in retrospect, it would have been more effective moving in the opposite direction which would have created a relationship with the image itself, as if the figure is being thrown off balance by the movement.

Developing this idea further, it would be possible to see, quite literally, through someone else’s eyes. In this respect, Sophie chose an image in which a model was wearing sunglasses, which she cut out, which was ingenious.

All in all, a super-charged day which has provided lots of food for thought.