Short listed for this years Europrix Top Award in Cross Media Mirror_SPACE was my personal bet to win. It didn't but I still think it was the best piece in that category, which was also the category my own project Reciprocal Space won a Top Talent Quality Seal Award in. Below are details of the Mirror_SPACE masterminded by Brigitta Zics and created with the support of Jörg Lindenmaier, Jerome Thoma and Matthias Weber.
Mirror_SPACE is a virtual mirror where users can experience their image transformed - not according to the rules of geometric optics, but filtered by a 'real time scanning apparatus'. This generates the visitor's 'mirror image' corresponding to the information supplied via its data network.
The mirror provides us with phenomenal images of our appearance according to physical laws. The mirror image is a transformed, cell-shaped manifestation of the users dynamic data. The aesthetical qualities of the objects combine a microcosmic vision of networked existence with a reduced visual component (virus/nano vision). Their virus-like nature represents a structure in which everything is interconnected. Depending on the quality of the relationship, this connectivity is visualised differently. The coloration of the creatures is an expression of their character.
Mirror_SPACE is a system of reflections of a type which involves not only optical appearances but also forces which act on us and which we cannot control affecting our phenomenal image. Visitors are invited to identify with a virtual mirror image that reflects their internal state (through mood analysis) and their external affiliations (through information streams from the internet). This new world formulates a utopian definition of identity.
The person is viewed as a node which is networked with the whole of existence. Effects which can be grasped by our perception are presented in this system as dynamic data and converted into three-dimensional objects. This process also involves the compilation of a virtual image, but the filter is the calculation on the part of the computer, which not only processes our extended characteristics but also data supplied simultaneously from the world
Originally posted on Interactive Architecture dot Org by Ruairi
