These Moving Mirrors Reveal a New Reflection
This article is by Ever Widening Circles, an online platform that’s on a mission to prove it’s still an amazing world. View the original article here.
Imagine walking into an art gallery to see a rather boring-looking piece—a bunch of blank panels sitting on the wall. You go to walk away when suddenly, as you step in front of the panels, they jump to life, turning and rotating to form a picture: a picture of you.
NYU Associate Arts Professor and Israeli-American artist Daniel Rozin has created a brand new kind of mirror, made up of cameras, tiny motors, and unique materials, all working together in perfect harmony to create a reflection of yourself that you haven’t seen before.
Mirror, mirror on the wall…
Over the history of humankind, many incredible inventions—from the wheel, to the clock, to the steam engine—have influenced leaps in progress or thinking. But have you ever considered the mirror in that class of game-changing creations?
Humans had long peered into pools of water or polished rocks to see our reflections, but it wasn’t until the invention of the modern mirror in the 15th century that we were able to truly see ourselves. 1 Today, mirrors are made of glass coated with aluminum or silver, 2 and their reflective nature shows us who we are to the rest of the world.
And yet, NYU Associate Arts Professor Daniel Rozin has created a brand new kind of mirror: one made up of tiny components, all working together in perfect harmony to create a reflection of yourself that you’ve never seen before.
Daniel’s work plays with how we see ourselves, and what we can see ourselves in: trash, wooden pegs, or even penguins.
It’s safe to say that we humans (most of us, anyway) are fairly obsessed with our reflections, checking them in hall mirrors and windows as we walk by. But Daniel’s pieces allow us to see something new!
Coming out of graduate school where he learned electronics and programming, Daniel taught himself the complex task of syncing hundreds of tiny motors and cameras or motion sensors needed to create his art. And now, working with everything from pom-poms to plastic to troll dolls, he’s created upwards of 15 mechanical mirrors—each with hundreds of individually programmed pieces. His first piece, the Wooden Mirror, took a full year to build!
The pieces don’t look like much if there’s nobody in front of them, but step in front and the pieces come to life.
The idea is that you can create a display by taking individual pieces and tilting them up or down, rotating them, or opening and closing them to create a stunning reflection of whatever stands in front.
So, without further ado, here’s Daniel and his thousands of motors in this video from WIRED!
More of Daniel’s amazing creations are featured on his website and Instagram page, so head there next to see more of this mechanical magic. The #danielrozin tag on Instagram is also a great place to find thousands of posts of people interacting with his creations!
For even more, his website features not only his 15+ mechanical mirrors, but a variety of software mirrors, video paintings, glass sculptures, proxxi prints, and kinetic sculptures that he’s created—you can find them all here.
“The content of the piece is you.” —Daniel Rozin
We so often think of art as something stagnant, a painting in a stuffy gallery of a centuries-old aristocrat that we passively walk by. But with Daniel’s work, art becomes interactive, flipping the script. No longer is art supposed to tell us something, now we tell it what to be and how to look. We become the content of the piece itself!
You are part of the art, and what makes the art beautiful is you.
If we start to think of ourselves as a piece of the puzzle, what other insights, joys, and wonders can we unlock? The game of soccer does not exist in a vacuum—it needs you. A car can’t drive without a person—it needs you. Life doesn’t happen around us, we make it happen.
So, glean what insight you can from a mirror made of pom-poms or troll dolls: you’re in the driver’s seat.
Not only are we in charge, but we’re art in ourselves, too!
Let’s dive deeper and think of the human body as a piece of art, too. Teeth are a marvel to behold, our bones regenerate every 10 years, and even the mucus from your nose has a superhero-level job. Humans can even adapt after losing eyesight to see with echolocation—that’s incredible!
Everything can be seen as art: you, the activities you make happen, the art pieces that make you a part of the action, and beyond. Art is not static, but living in and around us.
“My pieces are very boring when there’s not a person in front of them. If you go to a gallery and it’s empty and you look at one of my pieces… it’ll be empty… [or] still. But the minute a person stands in front of it, it takes your image. And I think that maybe it takes more than your image—that maybe it’s capturing something about your soul.” —Danny Rozin
