Initial Location Research

On Tuesday the 14th, I tried looking online to find the exact year in which the main building [that the quiet room is home to] was built - I had no luck online so went out to ask some staff members. After being passed between multiple people, I was redirected to a lady in the library who's currently studying the history of Wimbledon college. She handed me a small book titled 'Wimbledon School of Art 1890 - 1990' (1990) and also introduced me to the college's archive. "The School of Art moved into its new building on April 27th, 29th and 30th, 1940." (p.9) (From the aforementioned book); just as the Second World War had broken out.

Above: Francis Bacon's 'Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion' (1944)

This instantly brought to mind the triptych painting "Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion" (Bacon, 1944) as seen above. A few years ago, I was lead to believe that this painting documented the unethical human experimentation at work in WWII Germany; after some research today I've discovered that although this may be a possibility, it isn't entirely accurate. Nonetheless, the violation of medical ethics is a topic I want to take forth to develop my own concept ideas.

I've been reading online into the main elements of Nazi Germany's treatment of their prisoners. These medical procedures are now "considered" as examples of medical torture. The embodied outcomes ranged from death, trauma, disfigurement to permanent disability and all inmates were subjected involuntarily. The reasons for these hazardous experiments were to develop the German military's personnel, military, aid of recovery and to progress their racial ideology. The main point is the dehumanised treatment of a being for a personal gain of destruction to others. I want to base my character and set-design loosely upon Nazi medical experimentation. In other words, the time and location will be an alternate world's Germany in the year 1940 and, furthermore, the experimentation being put into practice on the subject will be fictitious. I want the pipes to pump in vast amounts of growth hormones and proteins into the man [hence his unnatural dimensions] and for the room to exist as a truly unforgiving prison cell. No food or water, no light and no furniture - kept alive through the injecting pipes alone. The vague idea so far is that he is being built for battle in this alternate universe.

Two quick observation sketches from the Quiet Room

Later on in the day, I went and sat in the quiet room to come up with some kind of addition to the original concept idea, it needed more substance to it. At first I considered some kind of hole in the bottom of a wall in which an unmentioned character would pass through alcohol repeatedly to provide a coping mechanism, for which he would be surround by empty glass bottles - this wasn't good enough.

It was a while later that I decided to add a partition in the room, creating a division between the subjects' space and the monitoring area for the practitioners. The pipes will converge towards, and into, the viewing space and a large, thick security window will be placed in the centre of this false wall. The viewing area will be brimming with equipment (monitors, laboratory apparatus, cabling, chemical tanks, etc) and a serious psychological distant will be made using the glass window barrier.

Above: Rough isometric indicating partition wall: just after inset on the left-hand-side.

Above: rough concept idea.

More significantly, I want this set-deisgn to be a forgotten science experiment; the man has been abandoned and left to rot in this room. Everything will be deteriorating, broken and covered in dust. We have no idea just how long he's been left alone and there is a suggestion that he will never escape. Below is a selection of reference images from 1940's German hospitals, laboratories and cells, 'Stalker' the film, 'Wolfenstein' the video-game series [concept art] and a few inmates used in the unethical experiments conducted during WWII.

The effect I'm going for on the walls is similar to that of the stalker's home, mouldy, peeling, discoloured wallpaper. The piping will be a rusting bronze and I'd like the viewing room to have a slight green tint to the walls. When it comes to the equipment, I definitely need to do some more research into the exact apparatus that would be used to conduct such an experiment. Note: multiple signs will be displayed in the viewing room, one of these will be used for scaling-up.

On Thursday the 16th, we had a brief introduction into technical drawing for set-design. I have some experience in this area from studying A-level architecture, surprisingly we only studied and applied this skill in the first unit of AS, nevertheless, this still gives me a good foundation to work from. For about 2 hours on Friday morning, I sat and measured every single component of the quiet room: creating a floor plan, ceiling plan, and 4 elevation plans of the enclosing walls. These were all done to a high degree of accuracy and hopefully this will pay off when it comes to creating the initial white models. We were also given a 1:25 scale task to create a model of ourselves which I'm assuming will be used in the white card model for a scale comparison. In the coming week, I will be formatting this on a larger scale and to a professional level. These will then be printed off as final technical references for model-making.