A viewer’s silhouette rendering mid-flock. Photo courtesy bitforms gallery, New York.
Daniel Rozin’s Penguins Mirror renders your silhouette across 450 motorized stuffed penguins, each one spinning to show its black back or white belly. It’s one stop in three decades of mechanical mirrors he’s built from wood, trash, pegs, and fur — none of them glass.
Penguins Mirror (2015) mounts 450 motorized stuffed penguins on individual tin bases, wired to a motion sensor and a computer. When someone steps in front of the piece, custom software spins each penguin in place — black side out, or white — so the flock renders the viewer’s outline the way a stadium card stunt renders a picture, one crude pixel per bird. It premiered at bitforms gallery in New York in Descent With Modification, a show that ran May 13 through July 3, 2015: Rozin’s seventh solo exhibition at the gallery since 2002.
It’s one entry in a series Rozin has built since 1999, each iteration swapping material and keeping the trick. Wooden Mirror, his first, moved 830 servo-motored wood tiles. Trash Mirror (2001) built the same picture plane from 500 discarded, irregular objects. Peg Mirror and Weave Mirror, both 2007, used 650 cylindrical wood pegs and 768 motorized C-shaped prints woven tight enough to read as fabric. PomPom Mirror, the same year as the penguins, swapped in 928 faux-fur puffs steered by computer vision instead of a motion sensor. The material changes; turning ordinary stuff into a coarse grid that reflects a person instead of light does not.
Here’s the honest catch with this specific flock: bitforms lists Penguins Mirror as a unique work, “dimensions variable,” sold only by inquiry, and currently linked to no exhibition at all. A second unique edition, Penguins Mirror #2, exists from 2018, also inquire-only. Neither is on public view. If a collector owns this exact flock, it’s living in private storage or a private room, not somewhere you can walk up to.
Other Rozin mirrors are easier to find. The Exploratorium in San Francisco runs two of his companion pieces, Self-Centered Mirror and Self-Excluding Mirror, as standing exhibits in its Osher Gallery — 34 tilted mirror strips apiece, one that shows you nothing but yourself, one that erases you. A career-spanning survey, Interference: The Interactive Art of Daniel Rozin, just closed a five-month run at the Museum of Art + Light in Manhattan, Kansas. So: not this exact flock of penguins, but the mechanism behind it — yes, and worth the detour.