Eva Hellman
Illuminated Shadows
Illuminating the Shadows behind the Splook Climbing Kraung
“But we need light to survive.”
While working on this project, I heard this sentiment a lot. After explaining my concept, creating an organism that evolved in a world without light, many would shut me down, saying Earth has light and therefore Kraung is impossible. This was the main roadblock I came across during the project. Some people didn’t get my whole idea and didn’t understand why I would spend time doing something that had so few real world applications.
I can’t deny that we need light to survive, but that doesn’t mean something else doesn’t. That’s the whole point of Kraung. More things are possible than we realize. I eventually recognized that not everyone was going to get it, and that was okay. Instead of internalizing these criticisms, I focused on the positive responses about my idea. When people told me my project was cool, fresh, or just so weird, I got excited. Thank you to everyone who believed in the impossible.
Kraung’s Perspective
My finger brushed the Splook’s rigid branch. The vibration reverberated around the unbroken circle and back into my awaiting finger. I was careful not to hit the branch too hard. I didn’t want the Spinch in the folds below to realize I was waiting. Pity the Spinch’s young was a sucker for the Splook’s bark. But it was great for me. Barely had to scavenge during this time of year.
I wrapped my toes around the branch. My fingers sensed the motion. I’d become pretty good at differentiating my own vibrations from others, including the Spinch and Blarmel and Frastinite, but it wasn’t something that came as easily to me as it did to other Kraungs. When I was two rotations old, I had spent an entire coldspell chasing after a Spinch. I had been so confused when I couldn’t find it right under my belly until I realized my own footsteps had been producing the vibrations the whole time. I should have known it couldn’t have been a Splook because its frothy breath hadn’t been overwhelming my antennae. That’s always a giveaway these days. I don’t understand why they don’t use the dirt as a tongue anti-fungal. It always works for me, but I’m not going to tell any Spinch that.
I stuck my head out. The stench coming from the Spinch’s mouth was almost enough to force me away, but I was hungry. I leapt across a gap in the branches, the stagnant air whipping past the vertical bulge along my backside. Pockets of air made its way into the crevices and cooled my body. Now the Spinch wouldn’t even be able to sense my heat. I landed on a branch closer to my unwary prey. My antennae picked up its breath even more now. It was putrid, at best.
I crept along the branch until my hands told me I was directly above it. I jumped down, and my tail grazed the branch on my way down. I tackled the Spinch, covering its blowhole with my toe so it couldn’t eject its poison. Its breathing slowed and then stopped. My antennae perked up again, pleased that the rancid stench would be no more.
Sorry Spinch, it’s dinnertime.
Why invent an organism?
During my quarter abroad in Australia, I did research on the Great Bowerbird, a species that retrieves grey and silver objects from its surroundings and displays them in a unique pattern to attract potential mates. I named the bowerbird near our classroom Camel because I thought it was random but also endearing. I spent hours watching videos of Camel, who spent most of his waking hours building a sculpture and doing an awkward dance around it to impress the ladies. It was so weird, which made me want to watch it more.
Going to Madagascar during the summer after my junior year heightened my interest in evolutionary biology. I saw a multitude of cool organisms. Giraffe Weevil males have awkward-looking long necks, Tomato Frogs are bright red, and Leaf-Tailed Geckos actually look like leaves. When the aye-aye climbed down the tree with its glowing eyes and excessively long middle finger pointed toward me, I realized what it was about these animals that enticed me. I love weird adaptations.
Inventing an organism that evolved in an atypical environment seemed like a great way to create something bizarre while holding true to biological processes. Throughout the year, I began to realize we’ve decided what’s weird. Things are weird because they’re unusual. Weird adaptations are there for a reason, so depending on your perspective, weird adaptations aren’t really that weird at all.
A Lightless World
My grandmother suffers from macular degeneration. The disease began slowly, but now she can’t see anything. She feels her way around and listens to understand the world around her. I can’t imagine what my life would be like without the ability to see. I would miss the colors and the shapes, the smiles on people’s faces.
Macular degeneration is genetic, meaning there is a large chance that when I’m eighty I won’t be able to see anything either. I wanted to better understand what life would be like without the ability to see.
I created the Kraung species to imagine how other senses could be heightened if visuals weren’t part of our perception. None of its genetic ancestors would ever have possessed eyes, and thus Kraungs aren’t blind like moles or deep sea fish. There is no such thing as blindness on Fleeda because visuals as we know them don’t exist.
Kraung can see everything, just through different means than us. Colors can be identified through radiated heat. Vibrations help determine shapes.
Did you know you can hear a smile?
Invention Process
I spent a good amount of time researching organisms that live in dark places, are nocturnal, or don’t have eyes for whatever reason. My biggest inspiration for the Kraung came from the star-nosed mole. Twenty-two fleshy appendages circle its snout, each covered with 25,000 Eimer’s organs, which act as touch sensory receptors. These moles take less than a quarter of a second to identify and eat a piece of prey, based on touch by their Eimer’s organs. I noticed the appendages look somewhat like fingers and decided the Kraung would have star-nosed mole like fingers.
After that, I began sketching different ideas for the Kraung. Some looked similar to animals we have here on Earth (e.g. aardvark) while others seemed completely ridiculous (a cylindrically walking clock).
I settled on something in between that was human enough that I could act as it but not too familiar that it was boring. Kraung has four legs because I have two arms and two legs. He has a head because I have a head, and biologically it makes sense to have a central place where sensory organs are concentrated. Kraung has antennae atop that head because my hair could be antennae. After settling on a general concept for the Kraung, I began building a clay model. It evolved every time I created a new one depending on what looked better aesthetically, the capabilities I had with the clay, and the chance my finger created a bump or hole. I have to thank the wonderful Morgan McCluskey for her input on this part every step of the way. Kraung would not have turned out the same without her.
My inexperience with sculpting definitely hindered me on this part. Every time I made a new Kraung he looked different in a way that wasn’t purposeful. It definitely got frustrating when the model didn’t look the way I wanted. There were many iterations where the model looked too squat, the fingers were too short, or the mouth didn’t have the right shape. The clay I used for the final model dried quickly, and I often didn’t have time to construct all the details I wanted before it was too dry to work with. It worked out, though, and sometimes the mistakes looked better or more interesting than the figure I had imagined.
Why circus?
My heart jolted as I surveyed the audience thirty feet below. I climbed over the railing, onto the shimmering teal fabric, and descended towards their upturned heads. My big toe met the knot in the fabric. I curled around it, hiding, and then splayed out, my legs and torso wrapped, my fingers grasping and then closing around the empty air. As I twirled my head towards the ground, the lights reflected off the glossy chairs and the audience members’ glasses, blue, green, and yellow circles swirling in the crowd below. My fingers clasped the fabric. I kicked my leg back, and it flashed in the shape of a crescent moon before wrapping around the fabric overhead. A murmur ran through the crowd as I began my ascent upwards.
I began taking dance classes when I was five and continued until the end of high school. My favorite performance roles were ones where I could express myself in unusual ways. In my everyday life I could never be a rose petal or one of Uranus’s moons, but in dance I could be anything I wanted, adding my own interpretations of what it meant to be these objects through my performance. I discovered aerial arts in eighth grade. It combined the beauty of dance and the power to express myself with the capability to defy traditional possibilities. Dropping through the air with only a thin rope to guide my way and holding my body up using only a flexed foot were things I never thought were possible before I did circus.
I chose circus as my communication medium because it pushes human capability to the extreme just as evolutionary adaptations push physiological and behavioral potentials to the extreme. I hoped this parallel helped my audience think more about and imagine beyond their preconceived notions of possibility, in both scientific and creative realms. Kraung may not seem possible at first glance, but that’s true of many circus tricks as well.
I am Kraung
Embodying my inner Kraung proved easier than I originally thought it would be. Sometimes while lying in bed at night, I would imagine I was a Kraung, trying to find my phone or lotion on the bookshelf next to my bed with my eyes closed. I took a black and white photography class this quarter and had to roll my film in complete blackness. At first, my clumsiness led to several minutes of feeling around, trying to find the scissors or other materials. I even crawled on the floor for twenty minutes one time searching for my roll of film I’d knocked off the table. I improved in the darkness once I realized I needed to stop opening my eyes wider hoping that I could see and instead rely on my other senses.
While choreographing my hoop act, I kept the sensory adaptations the Kraung had in mind, especially the hands. The biggest difficulty for me was remembering that I was a creature, not a girl with pointed toes and long extensions. I tried to keep a happy medium in this. I couldn’t reject all the technique I’d ever learned, but I inserted a few awkward movements. Kraung isn’t perfectly graceful, and I couldn’t be either.
The Exhibition
My favorite part of the exhibition was seeing the wonderful work of my peers. It was a humbling experience, being surrounded by these fantastic works of art done by some amazing people. It made me so happy I’d majored in biology. There are so many cool things you can do with it.
I was pleased with the exhibition and the number of my friends that came out to support me. I was really excited by the people that came up to me to tell me how much they loved the hoop act. I did think that they were mostly impressed with the art medium rather than the concept behind it. It was a little frustrating because I wanted people to be excited about the idea of Kraung. That’s what was new and different to me. But I recognize circus is really cool, and it was fun to get back on the hoop again after not doing an act on it for four years. I’m glad people enjoyed it, and I hope some of them try it in the future. (I’ve already taught a bunch of my friends some tricks.)
Sketchily watching people check out my sculpture was a blast. Most looked confused at first glance. I liked when people read the description and laughed or started talking about it to someone nearby. After looking at the Kraung sculpture, a friend of mine who I hadn’t talked to about the project before told me, “Wow, Eva, this is so you.” That was probably the most exciting moment of the whole process for me.
Wrapping Up
I loved how many different art media I got to do during this project. I drew, sculpted, painted, choreographed, sewed, and edited a film. I had done some of them a lot before (choreography) while some were completely new (editing film). It was a great mix of things I was comfortable with (and could push to the next level) and new activities I was learning for the first time. And I got to create something different while doing it all. No one had ever made a Kraung before.
Throughout my Stanford experience, I often didn’t feel that I had ownership over my assignments. That isn’t to say I didn’t enjoy what I was learning and the projects I was working on because I have loved my experience here. I just often felt that I was doing my assignments to the professor’s specifications rather than my own. I am truly grateful to Sue, Andrew, and TSR as a program for giving me the liberty to have full license over what I wanted this project to be.
Illuminated Shadows is the one thing I’ve done at Stanford that is truly me. It’s quirky and random and serious and funny. The idea of Kraung makes no sense and so much sense at the same time. And that’s what makes me love it so much. It’s so weird, just like me.