Untitled (gesture) is an eight minute animated video loop set in a digital reconstruction of Frank Lloyd Wright’s demolished Imperial Hotel in Tokyo. The film follows the disembodied right hand of a man that arrives around noon, spends a night in a hotel suite, and disappears again the next morning.
During its stay the hand performs a series of simple actions. It unpacks a suitcase, writes a note, plays a record of Wagner’s Wesendonck Lieder and moves through the room in a restrained choreography. The scene is shown from a static orthographic camera. After the hand has left, a cleaner enters, removes all traces of its presence, and resets the room. The day and night cycle begins again.
The work reduces the human figure to a single hand, treating it as the smallest possible unit of action. Rather than following a psychological narrative, I am interested in how behaviour emerges from the surrounding space. Architecture, objects and sound structure and choreograph the gestures. The room becomes an active force that determines what can happen within it. In this sense, beauty is not used as decoration but as a condition that shapes perception and conduct. The loop and the repeated cleaning erase every trace, as if each action had never taken place.
Formally, the hand was created from a scanned 3D model and manually animated using filmed references. The lighting simulates a full day and night cycle, compressed into the duration of the film. The sound combines archival recordings with foley of the hand’s movements.
