The Exploratorium is not a place for focus. It’s a haven of manic, hyperventilating interactions on par with my old arcade, circa 1993. Childhood admonitions (“Keep your hands in the bus!”) and acquired knowledge (“No sex in the champagne room!”) kept my creeping hands at bay. Never the paragon of self-restraint, I sternly strode to the rear of Exploratorium to greet myself in Reflections, a large science exhibit housing a small art exhibit—a very blurry line here, but it gets blurrier. Cue the Anish Kapoor moment, when your eyeballs scream with confusion adjusting to the monstrous spherical mirror announcing the exhibit’s rough entrance. It’s an appropriate intro to the perceptual dalliance dancing throughout the work of Daniel Rozin. Surveying the other energetic Explorers, I can see naught but the serious business of pouting, waving, leaning, Spocking, and—given the timing—pulling crotch like Michael Jackson in front of Daniel Rozin’s mirrors.

But this is much more substantial than that, much more than I thought it would be—essentially a 10-year survey of Rozin’s technological and philosophical explorations of the mirror. (You won’t know until you Billie Jean your ass in front of Snow Mirror.) Using motorized, non-reflective objects or software-driven monitors or something else entirely, he deftly carves new ideas from that watershed moment when a still pool’s reflection became recognition of self. We’ve since shed the water for more permanent media to train our eyes upon, but we’re always looking at ourselves.

Mirror No. 5 from 2001 nods to the impermanence of imagery with a flat screen of spinning (clockwise) and left-to-right-shifting arrayed circles, opening and closing like a Pac-Man mouth to approximate the relative lightness and darkness that the camera sees as you move before it. It replicates the viewer’s image with relative veracity from a distance; paradoxically, proximity brings abstraction. In his electronic mirrors (there is roughly a half dozen), Rozin is a rule-maker, like Sol Lewitt drawing up instructions for work that ultimately finishes outside of his control. It’s all cloaked behind wonky screen wipes, parade of filters, and simulated sketch effects and animations.

Additionally, each piece has a prescribed speed, which is very unintuitive to anyone attuned to the immediacy of a standard mirror image—can I see some hands? Often the slower pieces are better at dredging up the profound. Mirrors Mirror is described by the curators as “quite private.” So true! It’s impossible to see a reflective resemblance in the lo-def grid of 768 mirrors with more than one person in front of the camera. It’s also hard to see anything but a torso/pelvis reflection, given the low positioning of the camera housing. I bent to the will of various mirrors all day though, prostrate in the name of science and art. I assume this is one part Daniel Rozin’s M.O., one part necessity for the daily herds of three-footers. This is no art gallery.

This is never clearer than in the presentation of Broken Red Mirror. Rozin sends us on a search for a visible answer, somewhere between one wall’s fragmented mirror and our own eyes. The answer would seem easy enough with a little trial-and-error, but Exploratorium goes one further to instruct the viewer with big, black footprints—a gumshoe couldn’t miss ‘em. My feet in place, and achieving a major wall squat, I witness the mirror “collect” the image from all around me. Is the piece diminished by didactics? Do galleries utilize the footprints in presenting this piece? Is this a compromise? Should it be a compromise?

I carried more than a few lingering questions from the exhibit. The philosophical questing implied in the serial pieces Self Centered and Self Excluding drew up matters of scientific anonymity and artistic ego. What raises Rozin’s work “above” the toil of scientists and tinkerers who created Elastotron under the Exploratorium header? Is it the overall orchestration and creative constraints of the artist? I think the answer, at least partially, involves the obsession with possession and the degrees we feel we need to feed the necessary Narcissus in us.

--Andy Ritchie

(*Images, from top to bottom: 1) Giant Spherical Mirror in the Exploratorium's Reflection exhibition.
Photo by Amy Snyder.
© Exploratorium, www.exploratorium.edu

2) Self Centered by Daniel Rozin
Courtesy bitforms gallery nyc and ITP NYU

3) Mirrors Mirror by Daniel Rozin
Courtesy bitforms gallery nyc and ITP NYU

4) Giant Spherical Mirror in the Exploratorium's Reflection exhibition.
 Photo by Amy Snyder.
© Exploratorium, www.exploratorium.edu.)