BRAIN FREEZE ARMY (DES PUDELS KERN) is an 85-second looping video composed of flickering, polarized images of a Greenland ice core filmed by Lea Porsager at the Niels Bohr Institute’s ice core archive. The ice is around 22,000 years old, and its layers preserve traces of past climatic conditions.

The duration of the video is determined by the Doomsday Clock, introduced by the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists in 1947 as a symbolic measure of humanity’s proximity to human-made catastrophe. Midnight marks the imagined point of catastrophe; in 2026, the Clock was set at 85 seconds to midnight.

The work brings these radically different measures of time into relation: the Clock’s urgent symbolic countdown and the millennia held within the ice. At the centre of the footage, a frozen poodle appears as a playful and unsettling interruption. The image refers to Goethe’s Faust, in which a poodle follows Faust home before revealing itself as Mephistopheles. The German expression des Pudels Kern—“the poodle’s core”—refers to this moment of revelation. Porsager gives the phrase a material turn, placing the poodle within images of an actual ice core.