Anna Lundh

HEXA_FLEXAGON_F_EVER
www.myspace.com/hexaflexagon

When I was little, my grandfather and I used to fold hexaflexagons. They were so intriguing, they represented something magical I couldn’t put my finger on, and suggested that a lot more can be hidden behind the obvious. Every day my grandfather would have a routine of riding his bike to the library to read and search for information, and then go back home again. Just because your physical self doesn’t travel significantly in the universe, doesn’t mean that ideas and thoughts can’t travel infinitely far.
“In my life I need two tools, my bike and a decent leather briefcase to put on the handlebar, for the books.” (Sture Petersson)

The hexaflexagon is a strip of paper, that has been folded into a hexagon. This two dimensional shape can then be turned inside out, flexed, so that a number of faces that were previously hidden will appear. In theory, it can have an infinite number of faces, al-though in reality, the thickness of the paper sets the limit. It was discovered 1939 by a British fellowship student at Princeton, who started to fold the strips he had just trimmed off his American “letter-size” sheets to fit his A4 binder. It had a revival in the late 50ies, when it first became popular among magic buffs in New York, and after an article in Scientific American, it became something of a craze.

To investigate which connections that can be made between the ideas and the people associated with the hexaflexagon, I use the digital network Myspace as my tool. A some-what old fashioned and analog phenomenon is applied to something very contemporary and digital. Right now, HEXA_FLEXAGON_F_EVER is trying to become friends with Alan Turing, Lewis Carroll and Katherine Hayles. It’s an exponentially growing mapping, where more dimensions will uncover, for an unforeseeable future.