Wooden Mirror
Date: 1999
Artist: Daniel Rozin
Medium: Interactive Sculpture using wood, control electronics, video camera, and computer
Dimensions: W 67”xH 80”xD 10”
Link: http://www.smoothware.com/danny/woodenmirror.html
Wooden Mirror
Formal Analysis
Wooden Mirror is artist Daniel Rozin's first instillation in the series Mechanical Mirrors. The interactive instillation "mirrors" in this series are made up of video cameras, motors, and computers to form a board that reflects any viewer's image through moving objects made of unreflective materials. This mechanism allows for the Mechanical Mirrors to change and respond to a viewer's presence in real time, ultimately recreating a visual representation of the viewer by placing them as an active participant in the artwork [1]. Despite variation in material, each mirror in the series shares an exact behavior and interaction so that a person is instantly reflected in any mirror piece they stand in front of.[2]. Wooden Mirror focuses on the relationship between digital and physical with it's use of natural material to display abstract concepts of digital pixels [3]. Wooden Mirror is celebrated for its kinetic and interactive properties, as well as its merge of geometry and participation [4].
Exhibition Techniques
The Wooden Mirror has 830 pieces of wood each about 40 mm square arranged into an octagon of 35 x 29. Each piece of wood is connected to a servo motor that can tilt it about 30º up and down. The whole piece is lit from above with a few spot lights, in a way that when the pieces are tilted upwards they become brighter, and when they tilt downwards they become darker. The servo motors can position each piece in 255 positions theoretically yielding 255 gray levels per piece. Each 8 servo motors are connected to a serial servo controller which is a small circuit that takes serial commands and controls the motors. There are 108 such controllers in the mirror. Each 11 controllers share a serial communication line to the computer. There are 10 serial communication lines going to the computer, the two built in ports plus 8 more on an add-on board. Also connected to the controllers are 4 power supplies supplying 100 amps of electricity for the motors. In the center of the Mirror a tiny video camera is concealed. It sends the viewer's picture to the computer via the AV port. The software on the computer (Macintosh 8600 AV) is a combination of custom software written in C and Macromedia Director. The software digitizes the video and reduces its size to 35 X 29 pixels. It then converts the color information into gray levels and adjusts the brightness of each pixel to compensate for the various shades of the wood pieces. The software then compares the state of the wooden mirror to the required image and sends commands to the mirror to change the position of only those pieces that need to be moved. This reduces the amount of information that needs to be sent and allows the mirror to refresh itself about 15 times per second, resulting in smooth motion.[5]
Emotional Outcomes of Wooden Mirror
In W Hotel Seoul, there is Daniel Rozin’s one work of Wooden Mirrors[1]. This interactive work of art has the size of 365.8 x 182.9 x 2.5 cm and consists of wood, motors, CPU, camera, and software, showing the same system and likeness as other Wooden Mirrors but a rectangular frame. Thanks to a combination with state-of-the-art technology and his original ideas, this work was created with hundreds of wooden pixels which reflect a front figure on the surface, which seems to illustrate ‘the physicality warmth and beauty of a wooden mirror.[6]’ By inserting a brilliant, unique work of Daniel Rozin between an entity and a mirror as the meaning of reflection, the response to the presence of observers in the almost real time leads to other extended thoughts with the representation of ‘a blurry figure’ but ‘exact identity’. If you get close to this Wooden Mirror, you might listen to particular sound[2] which is from the slight, quick movement of tiny motors in order to turn angles of the wooden pieces, and this may remind you of busily passing many-legged chilopods.
References
Page Authors
Sasha Lintern-Smith and Ewon Moon, 2014