Hyper Essay Work Selection – “Mechanical Mirrors”

I’m sure we’ve all seen mirrors before, in fact, we probably use mirrors every single day from the moment we wake up to when we sleep. But have you seen an interactive mirror that’s not made of glass?

I first came across the works of Daniel Rozin when I was researching for the various display types covered in “The Ultimate Display” written by Ivan Sutherland in 1965. It was fair enough to say that I was “bamboozled” when I saw the Pom Pom Mirror from Rozin’s Mechanical Mirrors series. I remember thinking to myself, That is one creepy and weird mirror right there. 

Daniel Rozin is an Israeli-American artist specializing in interactive digital art. Rozin creates mirror installations composed of anything and almost everything he can lay hands on. His Mechanical Mirrors series contain individual works like the Pom Pom Mirror, Wooden Mirror, Trolls Mirror, Penguin Mirror, etc. These mirrors utilize devices such as motors, control electronics, motion sensor, computer, and custom software to allow audiences to see their own reflections on non-traditional mirror textures. The viewers not only take an active role in the creation of the piece, but also become the content of the artwork.

Below are some of the individual pieces within his Mechanical Mirror Series

Wooden Mirror (1999)

Trash Mirror (2001)

Pom Pom Mirror (2015)

Penguin Mirror (2015)

 

As a researcher who’s able to create his own mathematic expression codes, Rozin was reluctant to use mass-introduced software on the market. So he created his own custom softwares which made interaction between recycled material, everyday material, artist, audience, and the computer possible.

During an interview with Digicult, Rozin mentioned:

“The final goal of any art piece is to touch people, to connect with them. In order to achieve such connection one must establish a common language and vocabulary. The physical world that surrounds us is the most unifying language that we have. We all spend our entire lives in the physical world and have an amazing intuition regarding its behavior, this is a type of intuition that I believe we will never have with the digital or virtual. Combining the physical with the digital or computational allows us to take the best of both worlds, on one hand to tap into this collective intuition and on the other, to take advantage of the flexibility of computation.”

Very much like what Ivan Sutherland said in his “Ultimate Display” essay, both Rozin and Sutherland agrees that we have a deep connection and understanding of how the physical world works. We have an “amazing intuition regarding its (physical world) behavior,” a kind of intuition that we don’t have for the virtual world, whose laws and principles are flexible and changeable with computation. And this is the reason why Sutherland wanted to create an ultimate display whereby art can serve as the “looking-glass into the mathematical wonderland constructed in computer memory.”

In conclusion, I think it is fair to say that interactive media art creates awareness and mutual understanding between the physical and virtual world.

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