Untitled (gesture) is an 8 minutes animated video loop set in a digital reconstruction of Frank Lloyd Wright’s demolished Imperial Hotel in Tokyo, which was built in 1923 and known for its unique blend of Western modernism, Oriental aesthetics, and Maya Revival details.
The film features the disembodied right hand of a man, which arrives around noon and spends an entire night in a digitally modeled hotel suite before disappearing again the next morning. During this time, the hand performs several gestures. It enters the room and writes a request to terminate child support obligations. It also listens to Wagner’s Wesendonck Lieder, dances, and eventually departs.
These actions are shown from a static orthographic camera perspective. After the hand has left the space, the left hand of a cleaning staff enters the scene, removes the letter, and tidies up the room, thereby restarting the loop.
The hand was created from a scanned 3D model and manually animated by me. I first practiced and filmed the gestures as reference material. The lighting simulates a full day and night cycle, compressed into the length of the film. The sound design combines a 1929 shellac recording from archive.org with foley sounds of the hand's movements.
