MIRROR

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With MIRROR I was interested in the idea of creating a living museum, a downtown building that could change in real time. It‘s like an urban earthwork. Seattle is a very complex and fascinating city on many levels and MIRROR was an attempt to reflect the simultaneity of the culture and landscape you find there.

I looked at the structure of minimalist music, and that became the framework I used to create this. I looked at reductive music like La Monte Young, or Terry Riley, or Steve Reich—pieces that are continuously reduced down to modal structures and repetitious patterns—I realized that's the way I needed to design this work. To create an invisible system that could relate to and mirror what's happening around it, like a living composition.

The piece is going to exist in such a way that I don't think anyone will be able to see the entire work. And that's what I'm after. I like that challenge. I became interested in the legacy of people creating earthworks—people like Michael Heizer, Robert Smithson, James Turrell—their pieces are very much about the place that the viewer does not live. They're about the journey to reach that remote place to encounter that sculpture or invention. With MIRROR, I was more interested in the idea of using the landscape right around here.

The work will move through different layers of sensitivity: from the speed of people walking by the street outside to the reflection or brightness of the sunlight shining on the building. This mapping of the landscape and the surroundings feeds into the building, which sequences it live. The museum’s surface can sense all these changing conditions around it, thus creating images and abstraction. The building can speed up or slow down, it can change chroma with the temperature, or the speed of the wind might edit a live sequence of images a certain way. Mirror will never repeat itself; it will simply change continuously in the present moment.

Doug Aitken

https://art.seattleartmuseum.org/objects/38896/mirror;jsessionid=684A309690E1DEAC5A41A8BDA95FB472 (03.09.2021)

Title of Artwork	MIRROR
Year of Origin	2013-
Artist	Doug Aitken

Dimensions	Screen: 3072 x 1620 pixels
Material/Technique	Custom software editor displaying responsive video on a site-specfic architectural media facade. Environmentally triggered continuous video recombination, color, no sound
Collaboration/Shared Production/Research	Seattle Art Museum, AV&C (Digital Landmarks in the Physical World), Alex Czetwertynski
Owner	Seattle Art Museum

Medium/Type of Artwork	Installation Film / Video Architecture Time-specific Site-/ Space-specific Data- and media-based Mixed media / intermedia Permanent
Light Source	Sun / Daylight LED Light source visible Control system
Light-Optical Factors	Color
Perception	Seeing process

Concept/Themes	Urban contexts Landscape / nature Transdisciplinarity
Special features artwork	Electricity

History of a work
2013	Links	Seattle (US–WA), USA	Seattle Art Museum: MIRROR Doug Aitken (en)	Link
2013	Vimeo	Seattle (US–WA), USA	Doug Aitken - MIRROR at Seattle Art Museum 2013	Link
	Development / production		Alex Czetwertynski: Doug Aitken - Mirror (en)	Link

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