Reflected Selves

In nature there are no upright reflective surfaces. The only reflections in the natural environment in which our sensory systems evolved were bodies of water. These, Jonathan Miller suggests, presented a useful interpretive challenge1. By offering a puzzling visual inconsistency with their non-reflective surroundings they created not only a visual reflection of the onlooker, but also a moment of reflection – a pause – a reconsideration of the nature of the thing being looked at and its implications.  This moment of reflection, and the consequent cautious investigation of the environment (a limb dabbed suspiciously in a puddle or a lake) might save the onlooker from drowning. Mirrors have continued to represent these dual, and in some ways contradictory orders of reflection. On one hand reflection of oneself — the seductive allure of the reflected image, narcissism and self-absorption. On the other hand reflection on oneself — enquiry into the relationship between self and world, self knowledge, and wisdom. Driven by these two impulses, human kind has busied itself throughout the ages with the making of mirrors.

As our technologies have advanced, our mechanisms for seeing ourselves have become more and more sophisticated and complex. Our understanding of the mirror exceeds its origins as a surface that conjures an image by coherently reflecting light.  It has become instead a powerful metaphor for man-made things which offer a likeness of, and a challenge to our understanding of ourselves.

Photography, film and virtual reality, for example, allow us to capture and displace our images over time and space. But our reflections are not limited to our physical appearance. The computer, which can generate and manipulate all these forms of imagery, is a powerful reflective medium in itself — mirroring not our outward form, but our minds. Sherry Turkle argues that the computer is the first technology that reflects the human mind in its power, interactivity, flexibility and opacity2. “We search for ways to see ourselves,” she writes, “the computer is a new mirror, the first psychological machine”. The idea of the mind as machine is powerful not because it is true, but because it provokes thought. By causing us to probe the differences and similarities between our technologies and ourselves, the computer asks us to reflect on our assumptions and beliefs about our subjectivity, including notions of free will, consciousness and our relationship to our bodies and our mortality.

Art is also a form of man-made reflection, and mirrors have always played a powerful role in its symbolic language. An artist’s use of a mirror in a painting often draws the viewer’s attention to the rhetoric and operation of art itself. Like a message between artist and viewer, a mirror highlights the work the artist has done in constructing a point of view, and the work demanded of the onlooker in occupying it. It is hardly surprising, then, that mirrors should be central to the aesthetics of interactive art – a form which calls into question our traditional understanding of the operation of art, and relies on the reflective medium of computation. Interactive artworks, like those in Mirror States, foreground the audience’s active role in the construction of the work by creating real-time reflections of their participants.

David Rokeby has suggested that, whilst all interactive technologies are mirror-like, interactive artworks are “transforming mirrors”3. Their aesthetic power lies in the fact that they not only reflect, but also refract our self-image. This refraction is the difference between a “closed system” of self absorption (the first order of reflection), and an “open system”, in which a dialogue is generated “between the self and the world beyond” (the second order of reflection).

The works in Mirror States draw attention to the ways in which our intimate relationship to the mirror of computer-technology is shaping our understanding of ourselves. David Rokeby’s own work, Very Nervous System, creates a sensitive invisible interface in which the participant’s every movement is transformed into sound. The work creates an unusual experience of our bodies’ relationship to space, in which we feel connected viscerally to the surrounding environment. The air itself seems charged with potential, but our power is far from absolute. Rokeby has intentionally created a system with unpredictable behaviour, which draws into it the complexity of our broader interaction with the world. We cannot “control” the Very Nervous System, in the way that we might usually expect to control a computer, because we are part of it. Instead we enter into a seductive and unpredictable dialogue with the refracted echoes of our own actions.

George Khut’s work also augments our experience of our bodies. Using biofeedback technology, the Heart Library creates an intimate portrait of the participant, generated from the patterns of their heart rate. The installation makes visible an internal landscape that not only reflects physiological data but also psychological states. Our levels of alertness, tension and relaxation are all reflected, obliquely, in this mirror. By revealing the relationship between our body and mind, Khut suggests we can have influence over aspects of ourselves that we normally imagine to be beyond our control.

John Tonkin’s work refracts the participant’s image over time and space. Time and motion study visualizes the continuous flow of time, through the accumulation of instants. It creates, and constantly overlays, endless snap-shots of the participant, each one a frozen moment reflecting a slight change in the expression of the face or the attitude of the body. The work creates a beautiful composite portrait, but as the images multiply and snake backwards endlessly into the screen, they also have a vertiginous quality. The pleasure of the single photograph is the way it enables us to freeze the endless flow of time, to press pause, isolate a moment and create a memory. Time and motion study, however, refuses to pause; each instant gives way, ceaselessly, to the next. Our past moments draw away from us in to the screen and offer a three dimensional reminder of time’s inexorable motion.

Alex Davies’ Dislocation presents us with a simple video image of ourselves, with one important quirk. Peering into the video portals inset in one wall in the gallery we can see ourselves – looking – from behind. This simple switch in point of view has a disconcerting effect; in this installation we are at once observer and observed. From our disembodied point of view we are able to see a series of more or less weird, interesting and innocuous characters enter the space behind our backs. If we can tear our eyes away from the monitor and glance over our shoulder, we will find that these visitors are figments – ghosts in the machine. The installation creates and unpicks an illusion of presence, creating a visceral realization of the power and vulnerability of our sensory hold on the world.

Janine Randerson’s Albedeo of Clouds causes us to reflect upon the origin of all natural optical reflection — the sun. Suspended in the gallery are two circular screens showing two views of the clouds. One view shows us the light from the sun that is transmitted through the clouds to the earth; the other view shows the light that bounces back from the earth and the clouds into space.   A pin-hole camera captures the movement of the audience, which influences the simulated atmosphere of the installation, appearing as changes in light and colour. By implicating the participant in this radiant study of celestial reflection, the work alludes to the paradox of the human relationship to our environment.  Each of us is so tiny on a cosmic scale, and yet we have catastrophic collective power. How can we balance our individual powerlessness and responsibility? This question is at the heart of our relationship to technology — a force which we have used to make the world a more accommodating place, the process of which now threatens our very survival.

Everyone who enters Mirror States will find many reflections of themselves. Like a digital hall of mirrors, these reflections will not give back the images we expect; they may provoke delight, confusion, wonder or fear. In doing so, the artworks in Mirror States produce both orders of reflection. They seduce us and compel us with our desire to see ourselves, but by refracting our self-image they allow us to re-examine our relationship to technology, creating that second order of reflection - self knowledge – which signifies a new understanding of our relationship to the world.

Text by Lizzie Muller

[1] Jonathan Miller, On Reflection, 1998

2 Sherry Turkle, The Second Self : Computers and the Human Spirit, 1984

3 David Rokeby, Transforming Mirrors: Subjectivity and Control in Interactive Media, 1996.

Lizzie Muller biography

Lizzie Muller is a curator and writer specialising in interaction, audience experience and interdisciplinary collaboration. She is currently completing a practice based PhD with the Creativity and Cognition Studios at the University of Technology, Sydney. In 2007 Muller was resident researcher at the Daniel Langlois Foundation, Montreal. Muller was founding curator of Beta_space, a dedicated venue for exhibiting “prototypes” of interactive artworks at the Powerhouse Museum, Sydney, 2004-2006.  From 1999 – 2004 she was Digital Arts Producer for the Junction Art Centre, Cambridge, UK. In the field of funding and policy development Muller has worked for Arts Council England and the National Endowment of Science Technology and the Arts. Select committee positions include Chair of the panel for the BAFTA Interactive Art Award in 2003, and Co-Chair of the symposium Engage: Interaction, Art and Audience Experience at the University of Technology, Sydney in 2006. www.lizziemuller.com