Enter the Room

Hi all,

After today’s meeting Eddie and I have combined an idea of virtual mirror rooms which complement each other wonderfully. Clearly we have all been on a similar wavelength during this collaboration – Eddie an I even sourced the exact same image to represent the common idea.

Please feel free to crit and edit the text – I’ve tried to create a complement with Eddies text so that they naturally pair up.

Enter the Room

An encounter with real virtuality

Virtual Mirror Room 1.

 

 

Enter into a world without you in it.

Through our engagement with screens and images we are quite used to experiencing the world through seeing without needing to be physically present at the time or space specific to the event.

Through our engagement with screens and images we are quite used to experiencing the world through seeing without needing to be physically present at the time or space specific to the event.

How would it feel to experience a world where you have had your physical being erased so that you exist within it only as the spectator, a free floating gaze, adrift from it’s owner.

In the Virtual Mirror Room you enter a gallery space with a mirror covering the entirety of one of the walls.

You open the door and walk in. In front of you, you see a mirror. Reflected in it is the doorway you have come through and the door that you are holding open. However, there is no you holding the door open where you should be. You let the door close behind you and as you expect the door in the mirror in front of you closes too. You look around the space and see that the whole space including other viewers and gallery attendants are reflected in the mirror but you are not. You look down at your hands and they appear in front of you and the feeling of dislocation is dizzying.

 

As you look back up, you notice the gallery attendant walk across the room and as you would expect they are mirrored by their reflection. All of these elements work together to reduce your existence in the room to the visual and in doing so, invert the experience of looking at an image by removing the you from the physical world rather than the physical world from you.

Virtual Mirror Room 2.

Enter into a world with you already in it.

Through a door there is another room awaiting you. You enter. Having lost yourself in the first room you now meet yourself in the ‘other’ room. How can this be? First you were invisible lost in space, dislocated from familiar assumptions about your existence, now you’ve got ahead of yourself and you are already there.

The room appears identical to the room you have just left yet there you are in an identical mirror ahead of yourself in time yet somehow teleported from the past. And there again you see the gallery attendant clearly in the mirror – but yet they are not there in the real world space.

You move closer and you try to catch up with yourself. There you are with your doppelgänger in time out of phase but close in space. What is happening? How is this possible? Eventually you catch up with yourself and eventually you overtake yourself now ahead of your doppelgänger in time. So what is happening?

Upon leaving the room you are lead around the outside of the installation where you see the back of the mirror room walls. What you had taken for mirrors is revealed to be a complex array of super HD screens playing back a pre-recorded video of the space. When you enter Room 1 the video is triggered by your action upon the door and imitated seamlessly by actors playing the other viewers and gallery attendants. When you enter Room 2 you are again not seeing a room with a mirror but another array of super HD screens which play back a real-time but an offset recording from an array of cameras (hidden behind the screen in Room 1) which evokes the temporal disparity that has been encountered.

 

 

Things are starting to shape up nicely.