Megan May Daalder is a young artist in Los Angeles who is responsible for the Mirrorbox, a hands-on piece that uses two-way mirrors and a lighting sequence to allow two participants to momentarily blend their faces together in a genuinely arresting illusion.People tend to leave the Mirrorbox reeling from the temporary sensation of embodying another identity. Like an echo, the after-effects take a moment to dissipate. In an informal survey Daalder conducted with hundreds of participants early in the project’s development, the same response bobbed up consistently: people still saw themselves in each other, even after the illusion had ended.Soon, curious neuroscientists and psychiatrists came knocking. As sensory as it is scientific, the Mirrorbox now lives multiple lives: an editioned art object, a participatory experiment, and a research tool at the Brain and Creativity Institute at the University of Southern California. The Mirrorbox’s journey from art project to research tool is lovingly documented in Daalder’s self-produced documentary, Mirrorbox: The Story of How Art Became Science, which recently gained some traction on the web after Scientific American picked it as their video of the week.The Mirrorbox, which, as Daalder puts it, “helps collapse personal boundary thresholds,” has hosted thousands of temporary face-melds in its rounds through art galleries, labs, conventions and media arts festivals. It has, however, never been the site of an interview with the artist herself. In the interest of exploring what it might be like to pick someone’s brain someone while feeling, on some level, that you share a face, I went to Daalder’s studio, stuck my head in a black tandem helmet, and asked questions.MOTHERBOARD: Whoa. Tell me how it works.Megan May Daalder: It’s a two-way mirror, or half-silvered mirror, and it’s literally just light. I programmed the sequence with an Arduino micro-controller and it’s going through a pre-programmed sequence. It’s literally just an optical trick. It’s composed almost as a piece of music would be composed. I’m not interested in anything that doesn’t consider humanity, or some larger scale human phenomena. Also, to point out, we’re not really “doing it” right now. We’re thinking, which is different from how I usually do it. I don’t really think that much when I’m in here. It’s a really sensory experience: there’s my eye, there’s your eye, my mouth is moving, where’s your mouth?Read the rest over at Motherboard.
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