Record breaker takes on art

Oct. 3 of last year, Eric Limeback solved 5,800 Rubik’s Cubes in 24 hours, setting a new Guinness World Record. This year, the fourth-year business student at Wilfrid Laurier University is building a Rubik’s Cube art piece for Scotiabank’s Nuit Blanche, which is taking place in downtown Toronto on Oct. 4.

“It’s actually kind of a neat coincidence that the Nuit Blanche date is exactly the one year anniversary of my breaking the Guinness World Record,” said Limeback. “It’s a nice way for me to celebrate it.”

The piece, called Cubed, is an 8-foot by 8-foot large-scale replica of the corner of a Rubik’s Cube. It will consist of 3,500 Rubik’s Cubes strategically placed so the stickers on the sides of the cubes will come together to form pixel art.

The thousands of Rubik’s Cubes will fill each square on the larger cube, showcasing eighteen different circus images.
Limeback has prepared the art piece’s design in advance, however, he will not begin to build the cube until just before 7 p.m. Saturday night.

Jeffery Jones, director of the Laurier Centre for Cognitive Neuroscience, will simultaneously be giving a presentation on brain mapping.

He will be tracking the movement of Limeback’s eyes during the construction of the cube through an electroencephalography test. The EEG test will record Limeback’s brain activity, which can then be used to study how he is thinking while building the cube.

The project came into place after Limeback was approached by Suzanne Luke, the curator of Laurier’s Robert Langen Art Gallery, and Matthew Park, the manager of administration and marketing at Laurier Toronto, after breaking the world record. They proposed to him the idea of participating in Nuit Blanche, and he agreed.

“Throughout the year, we met up, we started to discuss … what we wanted to do, what would be visually appealing to people walking by on the streets,” explained Limeback.

He told Luke and Park about his experience working at a company that builds Rubik’s Cube mosaic art pieces before coming to Laurier. From then on, the project took off.

According to Park, it is important for Laurier to have a presence in certain communities. He said the university strives to increase awareness of the institution by contributing to the cultural richness of Toronto, Waterloo and Brantford.

“Community awareness in and of itself [is] hugely important,” said Park. “It’s a great way for us to have our name out there as an institution that is participating and engaged in the community.”

For Park, Limeback represents Laurier’s goals well. He has a very obvious passion for speedcubing and in his second year, he started the Laurier Rubik’s Cube Club in hopes of “bringing attention to the Rubik’s Cube.” Limeback’s goal was to “teach as many students how to solve the Rubik’s Cube as [he] could.”

On Saturday, he will be talking to the general public and demonstrating how to solve Rubik’s Cubes in addition to building the art piece.

Although he has attended Nuit Blanche before, this is his first time participating in the event as an artist.

“[I’m] really excited to see how it turns out and what it looks like,” he said.