In the Mormon Temples’ “sealing rooms”, where couples are married and where children are sealed to their parents, there are facing mirrors. My father, as an object lesson, would tell me about looking into these mirrors, saying, “Looking into the reflections that are created by the mirrors facing each other, you realize that the reflections would go on forever… if not for your own head getting in the way of the infinity.”
The Pairing Altar attempts to solve this problem via an interactive technology. An “infinity mirror” is a simple trick that can be created by facing a two way mirror (which can be seen ubiquitously in every depiction of police interrogation rooms) and a normal mirror.
An “infinity mirror”
Inside each of the holes the participants put their heads in, there is an infinity mirror and a low frequency generator. But it won’t light up or the frequency become loud enough to notice unless the participant covers the area of the altar that is lit with their hands… and it won’t create a fully lit mirror unless they are covering the area with a partner facing.
The interactive tool is created with basic hardware… an array of 20 inverted photoresistors… whose output is connected to 20 corresponding sections of the infinity mirror lights, and to the volume control for the LFO.
“Pairing Altar…” is a collaboration with Joey Cannizarro and appears in the show “Homebodies, Away Teams” now showing at the Utah Museum of Contemporary Art until May 2018.
