Experimenting
As described on the previous pages, this enquiry took the form of a growing collection of outdated scientific books, articles from libraries, and my own tracings from reproductions of Alpha's drawings. A one-month residency at MEANTIME project space in Cheltenham, UK, in September 2012 enabled me to take the research project out of storage in my attic and on my hard drive and work it out physically. By experimenting in this space I started to get the measure of the relationships involved in Alpha's story: the dimensions of the cage and the drawing board, the positions of observer and observed, the bright colour of the test sheets, the arrangement and size of Alpha's marks, the figures of human and animal, and the bodies of texts. The project space at MEANTIME has an upper and lower floor. The two videos at the bottom of the page show the upper floor in the course of testing out different arrangements of objects and the lower floor during the process of writing out the quotation from Schiller's report. The four image groups to the right show examples of the experimentation that took place. I have broadly categorised the images into four types of activity: laying out, writing out, setting out, and drawing out. (Please use the arrows at the bottom right of the image to click through the sequence.)
Laying out:
The upstairs room at MEANTIME provided an airy space in which to get out all the books (see Collecting) and create a domestic study area. The 1932 report of Alpha's infancy recorded that her first months were spent in the home of two scientists at the laboratories (Jacobsen, Jacobsen, & Yoshioka, 1932). Opening the suitcase on the rug and setting up a table allowed me to consider the physical positioning of bodies at desks. One volume of the Encyclopaedia Britannica (1910), devoted to subjects beginning with the letter H, was used as a physical object of knowledge that I could excavate. The cut became a rectangular chamber in which small foreign objects could be concealed (or from which the relics of forgotten bodies could be retrieved). Later, the books were arranged chronologically on a large sheet of paper. Working at floor level it became necessary to stoop, or even to move on all fours. These texts provided a fragmentary picture of comparative psychology as a discipline in the first half of the twentieth century. Some of the citations and cross-references between texts were traced out on the paper and, reconstituted from the scientific data, the small body of the infant Alpha emerging from this interconnected field of knowledge appeared as a running figure projected onto the wall behind.
Writing out:
The downstairs room at MEANTIME became the site for thinking about the conditions in which the chimpanzee was housed. The size of the room and its sense of enclosure made it imaginable as a cage. Descriptions and recommendations for housing chimpanzees (Yerkes, 1943) were used as reference material for marking out the dimensions of an animal enclosure. On a strip of lining paper running around the walls on three sides of the room, the quotation from Schiller's report that provoked this project was written in charcoal numerous times (see Introduction). Writing the words out over and over again was a solitary and laborious exercise. As the sentences became successively overlaid, and then rubbed over, a dense layering of scrawl was built up. A video recording of the process was later played on a loop in the room. The paper was eventually ripped up.
Setting out:
As a windowless and enclosed area, the lower room was also a space in which to consider the sublimated status of experimental animals. A crack in the concrete floor of the room, leading to a locked hatch (covering some subterranean space that I did not investigate), became significant to me as marking either a gulf or an escape route. Props such as a wooden easel, a tripod, and the overhead projector (all found in the MEANTIME store room) were introduced into the room and manipulated to become players in the power dynamic of observer and observed that the laboratory setup seemed to constitute. Alpha's role as surrogate human for experimental purposes and the relationships between chimpanzee model and human experimenter/observer were tested out. Hooded painting overalls acted as a flimsy human-shaped covering. Outside the building further experiments took place. Documented in the residency's blog (www.alphadrawing.wordpress.com), these experiments proceeded from the cages of cardboard boxes at the back of Tesco, down the High Street to an old railway cutting lined with dense foliage. (Alpha's parents were plucked from tropical forests to become founding members of Yerkes's chimpanzee colony.) In the undergrowth of the railway cutting I found an abandoned coat with matted fur-like lining. It was damp, stiffened with exposure to dirt and weather, and crawling with insect life. Although it was a garment I was reluctant to put on, I thought of it as an object of abandoned animal identity that might yet have another lease of life.
Drawing out:
Drawings and diagrams were the prime means of deliberation, reflection, and planning. Drawings multiplied on scraps of paper. I also continued to retrace Alpha's drawings (see Tracing), this time at actual size. The test papers were recreated by cutting out coloured card to the measurements provided in the 1951 report (Schiller, 1951). These were mounted on a twelve-by-fifteen-inch drawing board with a short handle, as described in the report, and Alpha's drawings were traced in the specified colours. I had previously worked from tiny black and white copies or large-scale projections, but once replicated in colour the visual impact became more apparent. The contrast between the geometry of the test sheets and the configuration of Alpha's marks became starker. The scientists had used dividers in their tracing processes. Although I did not use them except as a prop on the desk, dividers acted as yet another tool (like the tripod) with which to reinscribe the letter A.
