Interactive Art 1: The Infinity Mirrored Room


Yayoi Kusama Studio Infinity Mirrored Room – Filled with the Brilliance of Life 2011
© Yayoi Kusama/Yayoi Kusama Studio, Inc

 In this art piece, the walls and ceiling of the room are mirrored with the floor featuring a shallow pool of water. To interact with it, visitors walk through the room on a walkway made of mirrored tiles. Hundreds of small LED lights are hung from the ceiling where they flash on and off in different colour configurations. These lights are left in the darkened room appear to reflect endlessly in the mirrors, giving the viewer the experience of being in an endless space, broken only by points of light in the darkness.

"The Infinity Mirror Rooms can be seen as the expression of Kusama’s interest in infinite, endless vision, something that can also be seen in the ‘all-over’ quality of her earlier work in painting, sculpture and installation...The scale of the largest of these paintings is visible in an offcut measuring almost ten metres wide. Even in the early 1960s when she first exhibited these works Kusama was keen that they should overwhelm the viewer’s visual field. " 

 ---- http://www.tate.org.uk/context-comment/blogs/kusama-and-infinity

Yayoi Kusama is a Japanese artist that has shown a strong interest in polka dots. In this art piece, the various LED lights are resemblant of the polka dots she has shown much interest in -- except this time in an artificial infinite space. The room's mirrors capture the dots of light and reflect them endlessly to create a scene of ever expanding cosmos. This is quite interesting as it deals with the illusion of endless space inside a confined area. In the dark where nothing can be seen except the lights, the space of the room seems to stretch endlessly like that of the cosmos. One can't help but feel a sense of awe and wonder at how small one feels in the expense of space given. The sense of openness attained from walking through this art piece is interesting as it demonstrates how it is not the largeness of the space that makes us feel free but how small we feel relative to our surrounding area that makes us feel like we are staring into a new world.

--Ryan Ng


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