Silverbacked: A Material and Mystical History of Reflection

In: The Senses and the History of Philosophy, ed. by B. Glenney & J. F. Silva (Routledge), 2019

Our ability to reflect--even to reflect on our reflections--lies at the heart of both psychology and the humanities, but reflection is not a simple matter. Reflection is always distorted by one perspective or another. This paper is a mythopoetic exploration of the image of the mirror, a symbol of the reflective gaze in all of its distortions.

2019

The context of design is changing at a rapid pace. The impact of information technologies and digital creative tools continuously improving have revolutionized design practice. There has been a transition within the scope of a designer’s role - from simply giving form to a material to designing digital services. These developments have distanced design from tactile materiality. The designer, whose practice began as a material-based and rooted in the arts and crafts, must now rethink and reposition their creative processes and role within the current context of design. In this master thesis, I investigated this problem space by trying to answer the following research question: how does hands-on interaction with material influence the expressive and creative aspects of design practice? My method for investigating this research question is to engage in a practice-led research approach in which I explore the artistic potential of silver glass colors in glassblowing. I chose to research ...

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature, 2010

Why has humankind approached the mirror with both awe and trepidation? What is a mirror and what does it do? If posed fundamentally, the questions yield answers more complicated than one might expect… This introductory material is available in Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature:

2020

Since the Renaissance, perspective drawing has been established as the most ‘objective’ way to represent a ‘subjective’ point of view; it is precisely through the reflective surface of a mirror, as the space in which the self can be objectified, that such invention takes place. The apparent contradiction of an ‘objective subjectivity’—which most of modern science builds upon—can be properly investigated only if such space of ‘speculation’ is addressed as an excluded, invisible element of a triadic setting. The paper will then try to look at modern ‘rationality’ as a ‘projection’ arising from such exclusion and externalisation—to inspect the space of the mirror as an architectonics of information. It will do so by looking at a range of examples—from architecture to philosophy, art and literature—in which this third is consciously questioned, or where it is instead ‘invisibly’ at work. The outline of such a “transcendental topology” will then perhaps provide the tools to address in a ...

I start with the mirror as a prototype for many other forms of technology, the ancestor, if I might put it that way, of all more advanced forms of producing flat images. By looking carefully at mirrors, in both everyday contexts and more specialized ritual ones, we can move from there to some thoughts about the newer electronic gadgets we can now play with. Both the oldest form of reflective surfaces and the newer digital mirrors we manipulate share certain characteristics that may shed light on the different uses we make of objects and things/materials.

Inner Asia, 2007

This article explores the implications of the fact that shamans' mirrors, and mirrors in general, have two quite different sides, one reflecting images and the other a dull blank or imagined as a teeming other world. It is argued that, for shamanists, the far side of the mirror is conceived as the world of the dead, which is populated by spirits. Living people can, in certain circumstances such as divination, see 'through' the mirror into that world, and shamans when interacting with spirits in trance place themselves inside it. Two different perspectives, of the living and of the souls/spirits, are thus produced. The article ends with some speculations about the non-symmetrical character of these perspectives and concludes that the Mongols upholding these traditions are not post-moderns.

Source notes in the history of art, 1985

Mirror Maze: True Reflection The common vision of annihilation is the mirror maze. Inside this labyrinth of reflection, navigation is made exceedingly difficult as perspectives are multiplied. The kaleidoscope of mystical experience lays waste to the beholder as all motion becomes a violence against the Self, any action will decompose and reconfigure every image perceived, and the subject/object distinction is proven a persistent mirage. Cocteau's mirror portal is the entrance to this mirror maze: the temptations of Saint Anthony mirror the LSD experiences of John Coltrane, the annihilationism of Nick Land weirdly/wyrdly align with zazen and the Orphic journey as the direct experience of the interconnectedness of all lifeforms pervades every form of self-sacrifice and self-destruction alike. Extreme neurological conditions carve open the entrance to Plato's cave; being open to the "butchery of radical openness", a kind of living porosity, allows the Outside to leak in and flood the temple of Self, breaking down the distinction between inner and outer worlds. A porosity that allows for the true reflection, where "even recursion, then, is not complex enough for a mirror so deeply synaesthetic and so causally complicated" and there is no longer a Self to deform the infinite recursion of these mirrors in all directions and dimensions. The mirrored surface of the viscous Time that coats existence pours into us through this openness, and involutes us, re-mirroring our already-mirrored subjectivity back into objectivity. Vajrayana yoga practitioners hold that this outside-in point of view, the fully metastasized loving acceptance of the concepts of death, transition, and nothingness, is enlightenment, mirroring Mors Mystica and the awareness of No Self, seen as the natural state of non-existence mirrored in self-annihilation and ego death. The awareness, by virtue of a hyperauscultative perspective on our own awareness, that Death is the radical proof of the immortality of the vector. This paper will sketch an initial thanatology of the mirror maze and a reflection on its origin in the minds of its prophets, along with a short review of navigational tools that have been proposed, from the mathematic to the psychedelic.

The Book of the Mirror, 2007

A mirror acts as a “mind tool” that enables human subjects to stretch beyond our brain and body boundaries.