Daniel Rozin - Wooden Mirror

1999

Artists: Daniel Rozin · Year: 1999 · Medium: Mechanical-digital installation, 830 wood squares pivoted by motors in response to live camera input · Substrate: CCD camera capturing viewers; microcontroller processing real-time grayscale values; 830 servo motors tilting small square wood tiles to reflect variable amounts of light · Place: New York, USA · Institution: NYU Interactive Telecommunications Program (ITP); later bitforms gallery Daniel Rozin's Wooden Mirror (1999) is a piece that converts a video camera's grayscale image into a physical mirror: 830 small square wood tiles mounted on a wall, each one pivotable by a motor, each motor controlled by the grayscale value of one pixel from a live video feed pointed at whoever stands before the piece. Walk in front of Wooden Mirror and see yourself rendered in wood, at 830-pixel resolution, in real time. The aesthetic is simultaneously low-tech (it's wood) and computationally sophisticated (830 motors synchronizing with a camera feed at video rates). Rozin built the Wooden Mirror at NYU's ITP program, where he had been teaching since the mid-1990s. The piece has been exhibited continuously since; bitforms gallery has represented him throughout his career. The mirror series expanded over the following decade, Trash Mirror (2001), Circles Mirror (2005), Fan Mirror (2013), Mirrors No. 5 (2017), each one exploring different material substrates for the same core proposition. Each new mirror is a new physical-computational puzzle: how to make a reflection out of paint cans, garbage, fabric, shadow. What Wooden Mirror argues is that responsiveness does not require screens. The digital impulse, the viewer's image processed in real time, can be materialized in completely non-digital media. This proposition opens a different lineage of interactive art than the screen-based tradition; Rozin's work connects forward to kinetic sculpture and backward to the early cybernetic-sculpture practice of Seawright and Ihnatowicz. He continues to produce new Mirrors. He is based in New York. Lore Rozin trained as a product designer in Israel before moving to New York and taking up interactive art. The Wooden Mirror's 830 motors required a custom control system he built himself, and the servo calibration for the original piece took weeks. Each successive mirror in the series has required a new materials-and-motor-control design. bitforms has exhibited Rozin continuously since 2001, and several Mirrors are in major museum collections including the Cooper Hewitt and SFMOMA. Sources • Rozin, Daniel, smoothware.com • bitforms gallery, Rozin archive • Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum, Rozin collection