Mirror World was developed for Visual Expression I taught by Prof. Jesse Fleming in Fall 2019 and was shown at the CEMA Open Studio on Friday, December 13th. The project was a site-specific broken screen installation exploring temporal displacement in concurrent space. This installation was a reaction and exploration of Welcome to Mirrorworld by Kevin Kelly in the March 2019 issue of Wired magazine. Yale computer scientist David Gelernter describes a mirror world in his 1993 book, Mirror Worlds as a digital facsimile of the real-world coexisting in the same space and accessible only through technology; essentially a digital, parallel universe. We wanted to explore this concept by creating a window into the mirror world where the audience is able to see a dancer in the space in front of them even though the dancer isn’t really there. We also wanted to alienate the dancer from time and space by creating a ‘motion’ cut of the same dance which was played concurrently on a large display. Ideally, the audience would be able to look through the ‘window’ screen and have the illusion of witnessing the dancer perform ‘live’ in front of them. The juxtaposition of the larger ‘motion’ screen would create a sense of alienation in the displacement of time given that both clips are playing simultaneously.
