By 2009, Tony Quan could not move his hands. He could not speak. ALS had taken almost everything except his eyes. Six years earlier he had been one of the most respected graffiti writers in Los Angeles. That August, he wrote again, using nothing but where he looked.
A hand style built from two traditions
Quan wrote under the name TEMPT ONE. He grew up in the San Gabriel Valley and started tagging around Los Angeles in the early 1980s, running with crews including STN, K2S, 213 and FB. He was among the first writers to put pieces up on LA's freeway overpasses. His letters fused the precision of Chinese calligraphy with the bold serif style of LA cholo lettering, a combination that made his pieces recognizable across the city long before his diagnosis.
In 2003 he was diagnosed with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis. The disease progressed the way ALS does: it took his legs, then his arms, then his voice, locking him inside a body that no longer answered him. His eyes kept working. Everything else stopped.
Hackers and writers built him a way back to the wall
In August 2009, a crew from the Graffiti Research Lab, Free Art and Technology Lab and the OpenFrameworks community flew into Los Angeles and converted a house in Venice Beach into a workshop. Organized by Mick Ebeling, they spent ten days building a low-cost eye-tracking rig for Quan out of cheap cameras and open-source computer vision code, according to Not Impossible Labs, the group Ebeling founded to run the project.
Commercial eye-tracking hardware at the time cost around $15,000, priced for clinical use and out of reach for almost anyone living with ALS on their own budget. The team's version, later named the EyeWriter, ran on roughly $100 of parts, according to the Graffiti Research Lab, the group that helped design it.
The first piece he wrote in years
On August 24, 2009, Quan used the EyeWriter to draw again. His tag was projected in lights onto a building in downtown Los Angeles, tracked and rendered in real time by the movement of his eyes alone. It was the first new work he had put up since ALS took his hands.
The project went on to win a Golden Nica at Prix Ars Electronica, the Brit Insurance Design Award, and a place on Time magazine's list of the year's best inventions in 2010. A documentary, Getting Up: The TEMPT ONE Story, followed his comeback. The EyeWriter's code stayed open source, and the same low-cost approach has since been adapted for other people living with paralysis who want to draw, type or communicate using only their eyes.
Quan died on September 1, 2023, at 54, after twenty years with ALS, as L.A. Taco reported. Writers still bring up the 2009 piece first, the one he put up with nothing but his eyes and a house full of strangers who decided a graffiti writer's hand style was worth saving.
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