How This Guy Makes Amazing Mechanical Mirrors | Obsessed | WIRED

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 daniel rossen 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 Rosen's made mirrors from wooden tiles trash fans even pom-poms each meticulously designed built and programmed to reflect the viewers form I remember getting the idea that I could create a mechanical display by taking 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 but making that idea into a working mirror required a lot of research practice and patience it 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 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 the wooden mirror which uses a video camera and just pixel eights 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 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 and that was just the first of many challenges Rosen 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 several motors is that they are made 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 moving a lot so they fail 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 surprisingly it's the low Phi 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 tiles 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 rosin 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 one 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 but rosin 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 microcontroller with no graphical interface and no real way to actually prototype and see what the result is going to look like until actually have it working on the piece itself over the years he's added in transitions textures like this effect which he calls blooming or this one raining and why has Rosen 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 divided collapses you see yourself exactly as other people see you it's a very emotionally charged moment and that is a moment that it actually defines a lot of my art 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 squared but they don't have to be in trash mirror there 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 indicator is 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 two different directions we can definitely tell apart the foreground the background a person moving or even create pretty simple graphics and animations 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 Rosen'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 the piece is made of a 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 of the word the brass or the steel they make a slightly different sound in order to be able to create faster exchanges I divided the piece into columns and together they can hopefully create a much more rapid staccato or a chiller and row or any other kind of musical content that we're trying to bring forth ultimately it's the viewers 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 you

Channel: WIRED

Views: 5,268,116

Rating: 4.9538074 out of 5

Keywords: artist, design, interactive art, mirror, mirrors, nyu, penguins, trolls, tiles, mechanical mirrors, interactive artist, troll dolls, pom poms, pom-poms, pompoms, angle mirror, tile mirror, daniel rozin, ascap, daniel rozin mirror, daniel rozin art, daniel rozin interactive, interactive mirrors, mirror art, mirrors art, pom pom mirrors, wood mirror, wood mirrors, artistic mirror, art mirror, furry mirror, penguin mirror, installation, art installation, wired

Id: kV8v2GKC8WA

Length: 8min 12sec (492 seconds)

Published: Tue Jun 18 2019

Reddit Comments

[u/Taiko]

I've interacted with some of his work at art galleries - the black & white furballs one at 0:41, the penguins at 4:05 and the circles at 4:57. There really is something mesmerising about them, they're slightly slow to react to you so you find yourself slowing down, and then making very exaggerated motions and body shapes to make up for the low 'definition'. It really is an interaction and they're great fun.

[u/FrowgateClitsmith]

Amazing. Love this work.

[u/imlikedoriangray]

It’s amazing to see how his work keeps evolving...

[u/premacyman]

Wow

[u/Betchh]

Dis cool af