The Loneliness Machine, gouache and typewritten on paper, (photograph) 2024.
The Loneliness Machine was created during the first rainy season Alice experienced after moving to regional South West Australia.
The Loneliness Machine operates as a gage for loneliness using a personalised and interactive ‘tab.’
Visitors were guided through a scripted encounter during a speech given by Alice as an invited speaker to Spectrums held by EmAGN WA and the Australian Institute of Architects as an ‘3 Over 4 Under’ Emerging Practitioner (The Rechabite, 2025). Performed by Alice verbally to the audience, the machine enacted a pressing of a large blue painting alongside instructions.
The Loneliness Machine was about finding connection in a solitary gesture: how in making a mark on a seemingly lonely page, one realises you cannot feel a shade of loneliness alone—being a human means that someone else has felt that same shade of loneliness too.
The sequence of animations and scripted text used by Ford during the speech is inserted below for readers of the Codex to use.
2022/09/25 Unthings
CATALOGUE : archived
PERFORMED : The Rechabite, Boorloo, Perth, Australia
WITH : 3 Over 4 Under, EmAGN WA, Australian Institute of Architects
this project is dedicated to loneliness
(SLIDE 25)
“Experiment Two: The Loneliness Machine
This machine reveals the user’s loneliness.
The Machine does this by asking the user to choose what tone of blue most matches their sense of loneliness.”
(SLIDE 26)
“Using your finger, press the point of blue that most matches your sense of loneliness.”
(audience places finger in the air hovering in line/on the screen)
(SLIDE 27)
“We will watch the bottom left ‘tab.’
When I say ‘now,’ the slide will shift.
If the bottom left tab turns dark blue, then indeed no one has felt the same level of loneliness as you.”
(SLIDE 28)
“Now.”