Double Dutch (Fimbul)
“Double Dutch (Fimbul)”
2025
Digital Video, Dur 4:51
This summer we journeyed to Turku, Finland to collaborate with our friends and colleagues in videokaffe on our exhibition that opened this weekend at Galerie Herold on Bremen, DE.
My project “Double Dutch (Fimbul)” represents the next phase in my animation work. In this iteration five faces of the unfolding cube are animated concurrently with animated opening and closing of the petals / cube. I thought that the passage of time described by a clock face would be a good motif to use for this sequence.
Before embarking on our trip to Turku I shot video of a clock doing a full rotation of the minute hand from 12 o’clock to one o’clock. I then divided the hour of footage by 19 which is the number of positions it takes to open the cube fully from fully closed to fully open.
I then projected extracted the geometry for the 2D faces from the 3D model of the cube sculpture and projected the clock face sequences onto these shapes. I printed them on a laser copier and carefully arranged the sequences by cube position. Using glue stick I fixed each clock movement to the correct face and positioned each face using my transparent animation stands.
The photography was produced over the 18th and 19th of June, which meant long days full of sun and light especially in Finland where the summer festival of juhanus was celebrated the eve of the 20th.
I am really pleased with how this first experiment went. I had hoped to animate more faces but five felt realistic in the end. I have plans for a new system to increase the number of animated faces and I hope to have some iterations from that in early 2026.
Huge thank you to Ben from ChiLab Studio for his help designing a new unfolding cube mechanism and 3D printing it. Also a big thank you to Jenny, Sami, Sebu, Oli, Heini, Eero and everyone at Fimbul artist studios in Turku for help and support on this project.
For folks in Germany / Bremen area the piece is on view through Sept 21st at Galerie Herold! Danke! Kiitos! Thank you!