How This Artist Makes Mirrors Out of Pompoms and Wooden Tiles

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.

[Narrator] Daniel Rozin 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.

[Narrator] Rozin's made mirrors from wooden tiles,

trash, fans, even pom-poms,

each meticulously designed, built and programmed

to reflect the viewer's form.

I remember, getting the idea that

I could create a mechanical display

by taking anything 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.

[Narrator] But making that idea into a working mirror

required a lot of research, practice and patience.

I 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.

[Narrator] 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 a wooden mirror which uses a video camera

and just pixelates 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 wall 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.

[Narrator] And that was just the first

of many challenges Rozin 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 servo motors is that

they are made out 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 and moving a lot so they fail.

[Narrator] 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.

[Narrator] Surprisingly, it's the lo-fi 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 times, 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.

[Narrator] Rozin 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 once,

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.

[Narrator] But Rozin 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 micro-controller

with no graphical interface

and no real way to actually prototype and see

what the result is going to look like

until I actually have it working on the piece itself.

[Narrator] Over the years, he's added in transitions.

Textures, like this effect, which he calls blooming

or this one, raining.

And why has Rozin 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 divide collapses.

You see yourself exactly as other people see you.

It's a very emotionally charged moment

and that is a moment that actually defines

a lot of my art.

[Narrator] 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 square

but they don't have to be.

In Trash Mirror, they 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 indicators,

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 to different directions

we can definitely tell apart the foreground,

the background, a person moving

or even create pretty simple graphics and animations.

[Narrator] 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 Rozin'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.

[rhythmic clicking]

The piece is made out of 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,

the wood, the brass or the steel,

they make a slightly different sound.

In order to be able to create faster exchanges,

I divide the piece into columns

and together they can hopefully create

a much more rapid staccato or accelerando

or anything kind of musical concept

that we're trying to bring forth.

[Narrator] Ultimately, it's the viewer's 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.

[relaxed music]