Seth Wulsin

The reflective spaces I’m working on are a manifestation of something I’ve wanted to do for quite a while, but haven’t had the time or space. For the moment, I’m building a series of ten icosohedra, each about a yard in diameter out of mirror and glass, and fastened with silicone. Generally, 18 of the sides are mirror facing inward, and two of the sides are transparent to let light in and sight inoutin. The spaces generated by the vertiginously reflecting mirrors are discontinuous and overlapping, creating a certain kind of charge that’s quite exciting. The overlap of the physical space of the shape, the visible reflective spaces (there are certain space-tentacles produced by the opposing pairs of mirrors that stretch off into infiniti, or nothingness. I guess it becomes nothingness to the extent that the nature of visual perspective changes based on whether the distance between a viewer and a vanishing point is physically traversable), and the spaces that remain visually inaccessible, but are implied by the geometry layed out by the visible reflective spaces, gives a palpable experience of two or more things existing in the same space simultaneously. I’ve been thinking about forms of filing information, and the relationship between information and physical matter, and an apparent tendency in the evolution of human methods for recording and preserving information (i.e. the materiality of the hardware is proportional to the lifetime of the hardware divided by the accuracy, or level of detail, or quantity of information. A rock lasts longer than a book lasts longer than a vinyl record, last longer than a cessette, lasts longer than a cd, lasts longer than a dvd…I’m exposing how outdated I am by stopping at dvd). Mirrors embody a certain limit of reproduction, which goes to the heart of the paradox of a continuous perception of time. A perfect mirror constantly reproduces something where the lifespan of the recording is no longer than a moment, whatever that is, and which appears as fast on the heals of the event which it is recording (apparently simultaneous with, but according to physics, the time it takes for light to travel from the object reflected to the surface of the mirror to the mind of the beholder, which already opens up a giant abyss of uncertainties) as possible within the limits of space-time relativity. The medium which records the information is, effectively, nothing, since it is reduced to a surface, which has no thickness. There is a certain amount of physical material necessary to produce the conditions under which a reflection can take place—but the actual functional material of the reflective surface has little or no thickness, i.e. is effectively two-dimensional. It may seem that I’m mistaking transmission for recording. But in this case (as with all “live” transmissions), transmission and recording are nearly simultaneous, or the record may even disappear before the the transmission has finished, as opposed to situations where a transmission is produced by a more stable recording with a slower rate of decay. Sorry to digress. The project deals with limits, inner and outer spaces, physical and optical spaces, non-physical spaces spanning beyond the limits of their physical vessels, symmetries, and an essential possibility of the world constantly creating an informational record of itself which exists, not in the muddy vaults of our amazing, yet limited conception of space-time, but in a dimension that we could simply call Information, if it weren’t so unpoetic, the collective unconscious, imagination, the mysteries, maybe we could call it the growing fishbowl, or The Planet of Lost Things, the name of a wonderful children’s book that made me want to become an astronaut. Then there are the points of consciousness, or superconsciousness, where this information becomes accessible to varying degrees (the word information makes me cringe slightly, but I can’t think of one more apt right now), critters, people, and their meditations, sciences, epiphanies, oracles, gods… I realized while building one of the figures, and thinking about the blown-glass spheres that used to wash up on the shores of the west coast (japanese fishing buoys that had drifted across the pacific), that the icosahedra, effectively glass spheres, if sealed properly, will float. So I’ll set some of the figures out to sea (the back of the mirror, has a wonderful mustard-yellow color), and sink some into the ground (with one glass face exposed) in unexpected places throughout the city, like graves (there’s some image form a story or an essay where a writer talks about the inner walls of a coffin becoming reflective the instant the coffin is closed—a terrible thought), and suspend some from lamp-posts or trees. The working title is Pozos, Tumbas, Horcas, which, translated literally means Holes, Graves, Gallows. The Pozos float on the water, the Tumbas go in the ground, and the Horcas are suspended. (in english I think I’ll have to call it Gas, Gallows, Guillotines) The shapes themselves are like fire on ice, or ether, and the slight inaccuracies of the triangular sides gives rise to a whole set of irregularities in the geometry of the reflective spaces, and even gives rise to curves, which is a miraculous relief when dealing with so many straight lines and delineated spaces.