When discovering and exploring the motif of the hole in the course of the “My Hole: Hole in Art” project, I ultimately arrived at the idea that a hole for me is a hollow space in which images are being received, like in an optical device such as a camera or the eye of a living body. Light falls into this hollow space through a tiny gap, and hits a screen in the back of the hole, where it projects a faint image. What is important here is that, while that image is projected in the back of the hole, there is at once a human being that perceives the image, scans and recognizes it. The simple constellation of a projected image and a human being that detects meaning in it, inspired me to theme my work around the very relationship between the image and the person. Once we have received an image through such kind of hollow space, we humans certainly externalize it as an image. When the optical information that we capture with our eyes, is translated into a painting by our hands, that reproduced image can be described by employing the model of the mirror. Likewise, a photograph produced by a camera as an optical device, is also taken as a mirror of sorts because of its function as a minutely objective image. From videos on displays and in projections, to the mirroring function of recent digital devices, we certainly encounter in various situations of daily life images that travel through a hole, before being externalized and given meaning by humans.
“Mirrorless mirror” is an expression that I came up with after buying a “mirrorless camera” in 2021. In other words, the camera was a device from which the reflector had been removed. It was impressive to feel the advancement of technology that makes it possible to resize cameras according to the inclusion or exclusion of a reflector, and refreshing to see how images that used to reach my eyes through the transmission of light via a reflector, were now received via a sensor, and appeared as digital images on the camera’s display. Light is instantly converted into highly compatible digital data, and displayed as images that are delivered to our eyes. It seemed to me that the reduction of size and weight, and the transition in the path of the light, from traveling via a reflector to directly hitting a sensor, had become prerequisites of sorts for the existence of images in human society. An iPhone’s camera may be a digital device with a sensor that doesn’t even require a hole and a space behind it, and the crucial point of this development surely lies in fact that it made it possible for individuals to upload images and distribute them via social media at an astonishing speed, and we can easily video-chat with friends on the other side of the globe.
Images projected through the holes that are human eyes or camera lenses, or from smartphones from which those holes/spaces have been eliminated altogether, are all mirror images. They are not plain images that were merely projected onto the screen in the back of the respective hole, but they are images that have been responded to and framed, given colors and meanings. The (mirror) images that we see, are generally products of someone else’s output, through the process described above. In each case, that process precedes my own viewing experience. The experience of seeing (mirror) images works on the premise that I have dropped the function of my subjective self, and one may say that it is rather the (mirror) image itself, that initiates the recognition that occurs in the act of my viewing.
In the faint image that is projected in the back of the hole, there surely exists a connection to the real world, no matter how small the objects are. In the process that the image undergoes inside the hole, being framed, processed, and turned into a mirror, it is gradually segregated from the world. The further our information environments develop, the more the image’s segregation and humanization will probably be accelerated. This will eventually define a condition for us to live as a society, which we don’t even have the choice to affirm or deny.
The idea behind the concept of the “mirrorless mirror” was my desire to introduce some kind of change to the process and the result of the image’s segregation from the world as it travels through a hole and turns into a mirror, while at once accepting the information environments in the society we live in. The more the image’s segregation from the world accelerates, the more a world of mirrors revolving around human desires will probably unfold there. It goes without saying that humans cannot live only in world of mirrors in which nothing else but humans exist.
In their works, the artists participating in “Mirrorless Mirror” initially follow the human-induced generation of images through the process of segregation from the world, from the hole to the mirror, before generating images in the opposite direction, by reversely reconnecting images to the world. At first glance, the results may appear like (mirror) images that, in the same way, were externalized by humans, to become model images segregated from the world. Nonetheless, when we encounter in our experience of “mirrorless mirrors” that inverted operation of incomprehensible (mirror) images in the process of dehumanization, we surely feel how our perception is temporarily disturbed, to be reorganized and open to things that are yet to be established.
"Subterraneans and Mirrorless Mirror" statement