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