Consciousness In the Mirror: A Hopscotch History of Replacing the World
The mirror — above all, the mirror is our teacher.
Leonardo Da Vinci (1452–1519)
We build tools and then think in the logic of the tools at hand. We entrain our thinking and actions with that logic: cars changed our sense of neighborhood, airplanes shrank our perception of distance; texting changed how we write English, how (poorly) we drive, and interact with — or ghost — significant others. Our intention has little power over tool logic — unless we pay more attention to our intent than the pull-logic of the tool.
The ordinary mirror, once rare and expensive, is a telling object to show tool logic in action.
We know now, as we did not know when early makers first deployed mirrors, that mirrors aid in copying the world; that enough copying and mirroring leads to simulation; that simulation can lead to valuing the mirror as much or more than the thing mirrored, i.e., in soon-to-arrive mirrored worlds; and might then lead, unlikely as it sounds, to replacing the world.
Baudrillard describes this process of replacing the world in his “successive phases of the image”:
it is the reflection of a profound reality;
it masks and denatures a profound reality;
it masks the absence of a profound reality;
it has no relation to any reality whatsoever: it is its own pure simulacrum. [Simulacra and Simulation, Jean Baudrillard, p.6]
As the mirror is essentially a mirror image, Baudrillard is describing the tool logic of the mirror. Now more than a useful tool, mirrors have become essential to self-evaluation and self-presentation. Social media are social mirrors; mirror worlds, a destination. Once we looked into mirrors on walls. Now we look into them at the ends of our arms. Selfies, mirror images of ourselves, sent out into the world are a relatively new gambit. But compared to what’s coming, they are a minor blip on the new-new-thing radar.
I would like to hopscotch through a whirlwind history of mirrors used to reflect and ultimately copy the world. I consider these mirrored connections coincidental synchronicities; these unrelated events are linked only by their mutual relevance. By leaping through time, we can explore how reflecting and copying the world changes how we see ourselves; how we use mirrors and how mirrors use — and change — us.
Jump #1:
1896
“Then she began looking about, and noticed that what could be seen from the old room was quite common and uninteresting, but that all the rest was as different as possible.” [Through the looking Glass and What Alice Found There, Lewis Carroll]
When Alice went through the looking glass, what Carroll’s imagination saw, we will all soon realize. On the other side of the mirror, all the rest is as different as possible. Why so different? Because the (tool) logic of the mirror is different than the logic of conventional reality, which was built by earlier tools such as alphabets, books, and static images. Using the mirror — adhering to its logic — we see differently, so we think and act differently. In mirror logic how you look and how others see you assumes greater importance. In Small Data Martin Lindstrom describes how young girls wake up 30 minutes earlier to crowdsource their clothing choices among friends; for these girls, their friends are the mirror. Self-evaluation, self-reflection, is no longer enough. The technology mirror extends the self by replacing self-reflection with other-reflection. For the rest of us, time spent dining in restaurants has expanded because we’re posting photos of our plates to Instagram. This is mirror as experience expander. The experience in the mirror is now part of the dining experience, extending and altering it to include the reactions and admiration of our audience. It is also self-definition, presenting our taste level and life in its most idealized and stylized form. We will feed not only on our appetizers and entrees but on the reactions and admiration; we will use responses to enhance belief in our self-presentation in the mirror, just as Snow White’s Evil Queen asked the mirror to tell her who was fairest in the land. Alphabets represented the world in abstract symbols and marks; mirrors behave differently, replacing abstraction with reflection. These are completely different tool logics yet our (blind, unquestioning) assumption is that they should behave similarly. We are shocked when they do not.
Jump #2:
1993
A criminal with an educated but deranged worldview tosses a bomb into the mirror. He is afraid that technologists’ secret knowledge is dangerous to his world. He targets a computer scientist who is the first to articulate a new role and function for mirrors.
Ted Kaczynski, who would later bear the infamous handle of The Unabomber, targeted technologists whom, he believed, would destroy the world.
The young professor who opened the package bomb was David Gelernter. He was permanently maimed, losing his right hand and an eye from the bomb blast. Gelernter had recently written (1991) a prescient treatise, Mirror Worlds or: The Day Software Puts the Universe in a Shoebox — How It Will Happen and What It Will Mean. Mirror worlds, Gelernter wrote, are
“software models … that can mimic the reality’s every move, moment-by-moment.”
Kaczynski could not have chosen a more revealing target — a scientist who wrote a seminal treatise on the technology companies like Microsoft, Niantic, NASA, General Electric, and others are embracing today.
For Kaczynski, mirroring the world meant destruction. Kaczynski saw a technological copy not as a reflection but as a violation of the original. His violence presupposes that he saw the copy as a threat to the original (world): the copy would destroy it. He saw himself as a harbinger. While Kaczynski’s actions were reprehensible and indefensible, his randomly chosen target, the articulator of mirror worlds, was the first to posit the mirror as an institutionalized rearranger (and so a replacer — and thus a destructor?) of reality. Kaczynski, in his paranoid role as technology decrier, foresaw — as Brad Smith and Carol Ann Browne argue in Tools and Weapons — that a tool with benign intent may have emergent malign consequences. I.e., a tool that shows the world exactly may alter it beyond restoration back to the original. Kacynski inadvertently targeted the emergent grammar and behavior modifications of the mirror.
Jump #3:
Circa 1657
Dutch artist Johannes Vermeer (1632–1675) uses a camera obscura as an aid to painting. The camera obscura was the predecessor of the photographic camera. This simple device used a system of lenses and mirrors that allowed the image to appear on a translucent screen; the image can then be traced.
Gelernter’s idea of ‘mimicking reality’s every move’ echoes the 1650s Dutch Baroque painter, Johannes Vermeer. Vermeer inherited an inexact seeing; an approximate rendering, a fuzzier, looser representation. Using a camera obscura Vermeer sought to supplant an inexact rendition of the world, predating our notion of replication.
Vermeer’s idea of copying more exactly was beautifully narrow. To further his art, an idea that Da Vinci openly embraced, the painter was not to depict the world so much as capture it. (The poet Paul Claudel said of Vermeer he’s a “painter, a recluse hiding behind his lens, [who] captures the exterior world.”) The capture, a higher the expression of his art. The technology, a camera obscura, was hidden, unseen, in service of the painter. Like Gelernter, Vermeer saw himself as a world capturer.
Vermeer’s replacement was literally a re-placement of objects. He was placing them in the mirror to better render them, to supplant an inexact depiction of reality with something more true to life. This is a modern notion: to replicate reality identically. Technology mirrors had not advanced far enough for him to concern himself with the implications of identicalness. It was too early in the history of technology for him to see or think in terms of tool logic.
Jump #4:
Circa 1400
Filippo Brunelleschi (1377 — April 15, 1446) was an Italian architect and designer. He is famous for designing the dome of the Florence Cathedral, a remarkable feat of engineering. He also created linear perspective with a mirror to give the illusion of depth of field, which determined pictorial depictions of space until the late 19th century and influenced the rise of modern science.
Filippo Brunelleschi set up a mirror about six feet inside the main door of the Florence Cathedral, facing outward toward the Baptistery across the square. Seeing the Baptistery in the mirror he painted the reverse image on a flat wooden tablet. James Burke describes the first instance of perspective painting:
“Such was the accuracy with which Brunelleschi had done the painting that there was no discernible difference between the mirror-painting and the real thing.” [James Burke, The Day the Universe Changed, p. 72–73]
As parcel of his problem-solving Brunelleschi had become interested in optics, which meant the use of mirrors. In this regard, Brunelleschi saw himself less like Vermeer and more like a David Gelernter technologist: He had a practical, tactical purpose — using a mirror tool to draw three-dimensional elevations of building plans for clients. (This would, in James Burke’s words, “prove [to be] one example of perspective painting”; the styles of his time were non-representational.)
Six hundred years later it is clear that seeing with the aid of tools — using a mirror to record and see more accurately, to achieve no discernible difference — constitutes a perceptive revolution. Seeing changes thinking.
Yet once you cannot tell the difference between an original and a copy, a third element emerges: a different logic, the replacement logic of mirroring. Humans’ delight in representation is accelerated — and changed — by exaction. Realizing no discernible difference is Brunelleschi’s remarkably modern contribution to this hopscotch history.
He unwittingly introduced mirroring reality as a new way of thinking: reasoning and responding through the logic of the mirror tool. He had no idea he would become not only the father of modern architecture, but a forerunner of medicine, aerospace, biochemistry, genetics, and modern technology that now extends to weather forecasting, disaster relief, security, urban traffic control, and policing.
Jump #5:
January 1999
David Hockney begins to explore the historical implications of “no discernible difference between the mirror-painting and the real thing.” How did Vermeer capture such subtle detail, distinctions, and perspectives? Hockney recreates the Dutch Master’s methods by building his own mirror in a camera obscura.
In January 1999 during a visit to the National Gallery, London, David Hockney had a blinding hunch: optical aids, i.e., mirrors, were fundamental to the development of artistic realism. He was struck by the accuracy of portraits by Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres, and posited that Ingres had used a camera lucida or similar device. From there, Hockney began looking for signs of the use of optical aids in earlier paintings.
In his 2001 book, Secret Knowledge, Hockney explains he created what he called the Great Wall in his studio: organizing images of great realistic art by time period. A sudden rise of realism around 1420 became apparent to him. Hockney’s collaborator, Charles Falco, suggested that concave mirrors could have been used in that period to project images, rather than achieving accurate rendering solely by artistic technique and skill. After analyzing the work of the Old Masters, Hockney argued that the level of accuracy represented in their work is impossible to create by “eyeballing it.”
In discovering and presenting this secret knowledge, revealing the mirror technique employed by various artists, especially Ingres, Caravaggio, and Vermeer, Hockney also shows how mirrors change what we see and how we represent what we see. Mirroring, exaction, is an imperative in human consciousness. When technology opened the mirrored realism door, artists walked through it.
David Hockney thereby breaches another discussion, the focus of this article. How does copying the world change it? Is there another secret knowledge inherent in the entire process of mirroring the world? Painting from convex mirrors may have been fine for a time of tools with lesser sophistication, but ubiquitous devices means we now have everywhere incessant mirroring.
Jump #6:
1932
Pablo Picasso paints the Cubist masterpiece, Girl Before a Mirror.
Picasso painted a woman looking at herself in a mirror almost seventy years before David Hockney discovered secret knowledge, yet it is Picasso’s painting of a young girl that speaks most clearly to the future, to us, to our evolving mirror world environment.
The girl’s images are not identical; the face looking into the mirror is not the same as the face looking out of the mirror. The patterns around her are bright, mixed, different colors: she is in a noisy environment. She reaches into the mirror to see (to find?) herself. Her arm, a literal extension of herself, is both in front of the mirror and in the mirror, just as the girl is both herself and a reflection of herself. The girl’s hand reaches into the mirror to touch her image: is it real? Is it me? Critics have said she is seeing herself as an aged woman, or seeing darker sides of herself. The girl in front of the mirror is depicted in brighter tones, the woman in the mirror is shown in blues and purples, more opaque tones with her features less defined.
These two versions of the girl are an explication of mirror (tool) logic.
The young girl was Marie Therese Walter and Picasso painted her multiple times during the 1930’s. While his intention to paint her was not to articulate how mirrors change our sense of identity, in fact that is what he has done. This is how we see in mirrors: the image looking back at the girl is different than the girl looking in. When we look into mirrors (especially multiple distributed mirrors) they show us not only our self but the self we want to present to other selves. In front of the mirror the girl is shown in multiple simultaneous perspectives; her features in the mirror are unclear. Picasso expresses the modern perspective, where identity can be seen from different angles depending on how it is viewed; we are no longer a single self. In the mirror the girl’s identity is changed, darker not in a sinister sense, but less defined in the specifics of hair and eyes and blushed cheek. Instead there is a lunar, remote, undefined quality to her expression. We are not always sure who we are when we mirror ourselves in selfies, photos and videos. Picasso’s insecurity of recognition is prescient, it is a central feature of mirror culture, and is compounded today by recursion: mirrors looking at and into other mirrors as each of us presents self to the world.
We notice after a moment that the young girl is not only reaching into the image in the mirror, an action common to teens today and many adults, she also appears to embrace it. She is trying, as we are, to reconcile her many-sided-self with what appears in the mirror image.
Coda
In “Welcome to Mirrorworld,” Kevin Kelly claims
“We are now at the dawn of the third platform, which will digitize the rest of the world…. In the mirrorworld, everything will have a paired twin…. Eventually everything will have a digital twin … everything connected to the internet will be connected to the mirrorworld.” [Wired Magazine, March 2019]
Mirrors may not be as simple as we think. The emergence of Mirror Worlds, first envisioned by David Gelernter and recently touted by Kevin Kelly in Wired, holds remarkable promise to show, enlighten, improve, facilitate all manner of transactions and production, and then teach us about the world. Mirrors also have a darker side. Jia Tolentino in Trick Mirror: Reflections on Self Delusion trenchantly describes the quandaries and contradictions of how presenting ourselves in the trick mirror of the internet replaces being true to ourselves. The digital mirror is not a reflection but a distortion:
“As more people began to register their existence digitally, a pastime turned into an imperative: you had to register yourself digitally to exist. [And] “because the internet’s central platforms are built around personal profiles, it can seem … like the main purpose of this communication is to make yourself look good…. The presentation of self in everyday internet still corresponds to Goffman’s playacting metaphor: there are stages, there is an audience. But the internet adds a host of other, nightmarish metaphorical structures: the mirror, the echo, the panopticon.” [Trick Mirror, Jia Tolentino]
The imperative Tolentino describes is the different logic at work in mirrors: the more of them we create and use — effecting Mirror Worlds everywhere — the more that logic matters.
Humans always change, adapt, modify, and bend in the face of new technologies. This is a feature, not a bug, of human adaptability. Rather than wringing our hands about how much we’re bending, or the direction we’re bending in, it is far more fruitful — and relevant — to understand that we always do this and so we are far better to see and teach the entraining factor of human behavior. We always entrain with our technologies, just as humans always blink. Blinking is built into our sight mechanisms; entraining is built into our copying and learning and adapting natures.
So What? Now What?
When software first started “eating the world” Microsoft Windows presented a vision of seeing the world through software windows. We are moving from the window to the mirror. Here are some of the emerging realities we face as we accelerate rapidly towards mirror worlds.
The logic of mirroring leads, via emergence, to the logic of replacing:
o Desire to represent more accurately (leads to)
o Mirroring (evolves to)
o Copying (evolves to)
o Mirror simulacrum (evolves to)
o Replacement
Reality is now bifurcated. There is you and there is you in the mirror.
Artists used mirrors to enhance, present, capture and enable more accurate depictions of their world. They were driven by, and did not question the value of recreating reality, i.e., on canvas.
None of these artists set out to replace the world; they wanted only to mirror it. Replacement is an emergent phenomenon: it is not an original intention, likely not an original thought. But humans engage with mirrored reality — especially now that mirroring has grown more exact (i.e., L.A. Noire, Gemini Man, deep fakes) — as if it were real. Replacement happens because the virtual mirrored version of the world can be more useful, more annotated, more accessible than the world. I can be anywhere and experience a mirror world of anywhere else.
As David Gelernter foresaw, software is increasingly creating mirrors of the world into which we look to see the world more clearly. The problem: tools are not wholes. Tools are tactical. They are transactional. Moreover, UX facility has intensified the tactical and transactional ease to accomplish almost anything. Said differently, using these tools is a painless end in itself; it is fun, and often informative, to scroll and surf — a variation on which will likely enable us to navigate mirrorworld. Often today we need no further destination; the browser has no end in sight, it provides nearly endless stimulation and simulation. But typically, our tools, as presently configured, provide little or no topsight, the concept David Gelernter promulgated in Mirror Worlds to underscore the importance of large picture, holistic thinking and acting.
The next stage of mirror engagement, easily inferred from present concerns about device immersion, is that mirror environments will be so deep and involving that, akin to device distraction today, they will compete with — and replace — conventional reality.
It is time now, before mirror worlds become commonplace, to study and understand mirror logic in order to prepare for the coming changes in the way we see ourselves and our world.
Emerging imperatives
o The mirror competes for the “realness” of reality. We may mistake the mirror for direct experience but it is not. (This is especially true of interpersonal interactions.)
o You will look in the mirror to see who and what you are — unless (until) you walk away from the mirror.
o The logic of the mirror is to show what is going on in the world. It is not to be the world.
o We will soon have to embrace the tension that comes from resisting (remaining skeptical of) the mirror version of reality.
