How This Artist Makes Mirrors Out of Pompoms and Wooden Tiles
Released on 06/18/2019
When we think back on great inventions of mankind,
we think about the wheel and the radio and things like that
but we somehow overlook the simple mirror.
I think that no other invention has really transformed
the way that we perceive the world
and more importantly, the way that we perceive ourselves.
[Narrator] Daniel Rozin has spent a lot of his career
building, what he calls, mirrors,
but they're not what you think.
My work centers around the idea
of participation, of interaction,
where the viewer becomes a part of the piece.
When a person stands in front of one of my art pieces,
they immediately understand the interface to it.
They will see themselves reflected.
There's no learning curve.
There's no question about,
what is the contents of the piece?
The contents of the piece is you.
[Narrator] Rozin's made mirrors from wooden tiles,
trash, fans, even pom-poms,
each meticulously designed, built and programmed
to reflect the viewer's form.
I remember, getting the idea that
I could create a mechanical display
by taking anything anything and just tilting it up and down
towards or away from the light,
just like maybe my hand is doing right now.
It is bright when it tilts up.
It is dark when it tilts down.
And I thought, I could take anything
and create a display out of it.
[Narrator] But making that idea into a working mirror
required a lot of research, practice and patience.
I was just out of graduate studies
where I learned how to do
some basic electronics and some programming,
but definitely I wasn't prepared to create
a complex piece that required controlling cameras
and moving close to a thousand motors.
So I had to go and teach myself how to do these things.
[Narrator] The first project he attempted?
A tile mirror with 835 pieces made of pine.
It was featured in wired 20 years ago.
I had to learn how to fabricate all the wooden tiles,
how to move all the motors
and how to do the video capture.
I started with a wooden mirror which uses a video camera
and just pixelates what it sees,
but if you only have about a thousand pixels,
and a person is standing in front of a noisy background,
you'll hardly see anything.
So I always had to put like a white wall behind the person
which is not that difficult
but if you're trying to show your art
in an office environment or in a museum,
that's an imposition.
[Narrator] And that was just the first
of many challenges Rozin had to overcome.
The wooden mirror was made out of 835 servo motors.
These are cheap and very easy to control
and have a very nice sound.
They hum.
So I was very happy and used them for quite a few projects
over the first five years of my practice.
The problem with servo motors is that
they are made out of plastic typically
and they're meant to fly, you know,
model airplanes for ten minutes.
They're not meant to be working
24 hours a day and moving a lot so they fail.
[Narrator] Now he uses stepper motors,
which are all metal and don't have any plastic gears
which are easy to break
but they are tougher to program.
Some of my newer pieces actually don't use cameras at all.
They use motion sensors or laser sensors
to actually sense the people directly.
[Narrator] Surprisingly, it's the lo-fi aspect
of his projects that are the most difficult.
When I first created the wooden mirror,
it took me a year to actually build it.
I had to cut all the times, get the motors,
learn how to control them,
so the electronics and the mechanics
and the fabrication took me a year.
Then it took me an afternoon to program the computer
to actually activate it.
[Narrator] Rozin still does everything himself,
from designing, wiring, programming to building.
If there is any challenge involved in these pieces,
it's the multiplicity.
If I do something once,
I actually usually need to do it a thousand times.
So controlling one motor typically is pretty easy
but wiring and controlling a thousand
is where actually the challenge comes.
[Narrator] But Rozin doesn't even know if they'll work
until he's finished all the building,
all the programming and finally plugs it in
for the first time.
You need to actually program a generative algorithm
that will move a hundred or a thousand pixels
to create that kind of image or animation.
That's not always very simple
because usually I'm not doing that on a full computer.
I'm programming an Arduino board
or some other micro-controller
with no graphical interface
and no real way to actually prototype and see
what the result is going to look like
until I actually have it working on the piece itself.
[Narrator] Over the years, he's added in transitions.
Textures, like this effect, which he calls blooming
or this one, raining.
And why has Rozin spent years of his life
creating these intricate installations,
meticulously cutting, sanding and wiring each piece?
The way that we perceive ourselves is
in very stark contrast to the way
that other people see us
and when you gaze into a mirror,
that divide collapses.
You see yourself exactly as other people see you.
It's a very emotionally charged moment
and that is a moment that actually defines
a lot of my art.
[Narrator] The basic concept for each mirror is similar
but every new material brings unique challenges.
I'm interested in this idea of perception.
How do we see images?
In my mechanical pieces,
it means chopping up an image to pixels.
These pixels are typically square
but they don't have to be.
In Trash Mirror, they are just all kinds of shapes
and then I have sometimes round pixels
but they're always pixels
which means there are a unit of information
that can be dark or bright.
In my piece Angles Mirror,
I tried a different approach.
The piece is made out of 900 kind of indicators,
almost like speedometers in your car
that can just change the angle that they are pointing
so they're not getting brighter or darker in any way.
They're not really pixels
and the challenge there was,
if I only can change the rotation orientation
of 900 indicators,
can I really create an image out of that?
And it turns out that the way that our eyes
and our brains see the world
are actually very, very sensitive to orientation.
So actually by just pointing to different directions
we can definitely tell apart the foreground,
the background, a person moving
or even create pretty simple graphics and animations.
[Narrator] His latest project is a commission for ASCAP,
the American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers.
It's made of wood and brass,
materials traditionally used to make musical instruments
as well as mirrored steel,
and Rozin's trying something new.
Even though I've been using the sound
and enjoying the sound of my installations
for many years,
this is the first time that I'm actually trying
to design the piece so it will produce sonic output.
[rhythmic clicking]
The piece is made out of 768 tiles of different materials
that can tilt up and down.
The little tiles can actually travel all
the way to the end of their motion
and do a little click.
And according to the material,
the wood, the brass or the steel,
they make a slightly different sound.
In order to be able to create faster exchanges,
I divide the piece into columns
and together they can hopefully create
a much more rapid staccato or accelerando
or anything kind of musical concept
that we're trying to bring forth.
[Narrator] Ultimately, it's the viewer's experience
that drives him to constantly create and innovate
through the medium of mirrors.
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,
if it's a screen piece, it'll be empty.
If it's a interactive mechanical piece,
it will be 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
and displaying it back to you.
Together, we are creating the art piece
and the piece would not exist
without me and without the viewer.
[relaxed music]
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