Mirror Schools

In 1862 English scientist John Henry Pepper began popularizing what is now known as the Pepper's ghost effect — a popular illusion where a brightly-lit figure out of the audience's sight is reflected in a pane of glass placed between the performer and the audience. To the audience, it appears as if the ghost is on stage.

In 2016, two decades after his death, prolific British actor Peter Cushing’s likeness was used to recreate the role of Grand Moff Tarkin, the ruthless Imperial officer put in charge of overseeing the construction of the Death Star in the Star Wars saga.

In 2006 Madonna appeared inside a robotic 2-ton disco ball that was embellished by 2 million dollars' worth of Swarovski crystals for her Confessions Tour.

In 2018 William Bottini got a 100% match in the Google Arts & Culture app. He edited his own photo to progressively match paintings in Google’s database — the reverse behaviour expected by the app.

In the 2008 film Synecdoche, New York the film’s protagonist, played by Phillip Seymour Hoffman, creates an immersive theater set with actors playing doppelgängers of the figures in his real life. The set grows to encompass city blocks, with actors and crew living on set, before a calamity befalls the production coinciding with the protagonists passing.

In 2019 Maki Suzuki from Åbäke staged “WMDYWTL? (Which Mirror Do You Want to Lick?)” at the Frans Masereel Centrum, Kasterlee. The show sits in between fact and fiction, showcasing graphic objects from alternate realities such as the identities from the bids for alternative Olympics cities. The show describes itself as mirroring and duplicating, from reality to fiction, and from fiction to reality.

In 2009 Superflex made a convincing life-size replica of a McDonald's fast food restaurant and gradually flooded it with water — hinting to the influence of large multinational companies surrounding the environment crises and matters of responsibility.

In 2014 Surrey NanoSystems in the United Kingdom developed Vantablack, the least reflective material and one of the darkest substances known, absorbing up to 99.9% of visible light. The material has been exclusively licensed to Anish Kapoor's studio for artistic use.

In 2016, WikiLeaks reproduced over 20,000 pages of emails from Hillary Clinton’s campaign chairman John Podesta. The leaked correspondence included an email from performance artist Marina Abramović with an invitation to a ‘Spirit Cooking dinner’, prompting a number of right-wing conspiracy theories to surface, and giving birth to PizzaGate and QAnon.

In 2016 Andrea Fraser installed Down the River at the Whitney Museum. Installed in an empty gallery on the dramatic fifth-floor unobstructed by interior walls, the piece consisted of audio recordings of Sing Sing, a prison in front of the museum, right across the Hudson River.

In the 17th century Réné Descartes proved that our eyes see everything upside down. He set up a screen in place of the retina in a bull’s excised eyeball. The image that appeared on the screen was a smaller, inverted copy of the scene in front of the bull’s eye.

In 2018 Amazon patents a mirror that uses augmented reality and dresses you in virtual clothes. The patent describes the mirror as partially-reflective and partially-transmissive, and uses a mix of displays, cameras, and projectors to create the blended image.

In 2013, sunlight reflecting off 20 Fenchurch Street — a skyscraper in London designed by architect Rafael Viñoly and covered with concave curved glass exteriors — melted parts of a Jaguar car parked nearby.

In 1994 Carsten Holler released his first version of Upside-Down-Goggles, as first used by Erismann and Kohler to inverse perception and examine how quickly humans adapt to things. During the experiments, subjects wore the glasses consecutively for up to 124 days.

In 2000, Michael Riedel and his cohorts fished the remains of a Jim Isermann installation out of the trash behind Portikus, one of the city’s many art institutions, and reinstalled them in their own space.

On July 4th, 2009, the Yes Men published a duplicated version of the New York Times website. The main headline read: IRAQ WAR ENDS. Fake websites have been a common strategy the collective has used over the years, to represent their opponents online and expose their wrongdoings.

In the 1999 movie, The Matrix, Neo stares, after taking the red pill, at a cracked mirror next to him which starts changing. He touches it and a silver goo starts covering his body. Twenty years later the director Lilly Wachowski interpret it as a trans allegory.

In 2008, Dexter Sinister occupied the Commander's Room at the 7th Regiment Armory every day from March 4th to March 23th 2008 releasing a series of parallel texts that reflected that year’s Whitney Biennial — effectively setting up a shadow press office to the events.

In 2011, Aaron Swartz was arrested by Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) police. He had connected a computer to the MIT network and set it to download academic journal articles systematically from JSTOR using a guest user account issued to him by MIT.

In 2013 theorist Benjamin Bratton gave a TED Talk titled “What’s Wrong with TED Talks?” where he attacked the intellectual viability of TED, calling it placebo politics, middlebrow megachurch infotainment, and the equivalent of right-wing media channels.

In 2013 Simon Denny presented the exhibition The Personal Effects of Kim Dotcom at Mumok in Vienna. The show rematerialised the entire inventory of confiscated items taken by New Zealand police during a dramatic raid on the home of internet entrepreneur, Kim Dotcom, who faced charges of copyright infringement for his now-defunct file-sharing platform, Megaupload.

In 2006 the TV show MythBusters unsuccessfully tried to recreate the "Archimedes Death Ray" — a famous tale where Archimedes used a large array of mirrors to burn Roman ships in 212 BC.

In 1966 composer Steve Reich created Come Out using several copies of the same tape that played simultaneously on different machines. Over time, the slight differences in the speed of the different tape machines causes a flanging effect and then rhythmic separation to occur.

In the 1980s, the South Korean government built a 323 ft flagpole in Daeseong-dong, which flies a South Korean flag. In what some have called the "flagpole war," the North Korean government responded by building the 525 ft Panmunjeom flagpole in Kijŏng-dong, less than a mile of the border with South Korea.

In 1871 Lewis Carroll published Through the Looking-Glass, the sequel to Alice's Adventures in Wonderland. Alice again enters a fantastical world, this time by climbing through a mirror into the world that she can see beyond it.

In 2019 Us, a horror film written and directed by Jordan Peele, was released. In it, a young girl named Adelaide wanders off from her parents and enters a funhouse, where she encounters a doppelgänger of herself in the house of mirrors.

In 1915 the Danish psychologist Edgar Rubin, developed the famous illusion known as the Rubin vase in which a viewer is presented with two shape interpretations—two equal faces in front of each other or a vase. It’s an excellent example of the figure/ground principle.

In 2008 a one terabyte collection of digital material, known as El Paquete Semanal, started to be distributed every week on the underground market in Cuba as a substitute for broadband Internet. It is the primary source of entertainment for millions of Cubans, as the Internet in Cuba has been suppressed for many years.

In 2008 The New York City Police Department started using StingRay technologies for surveillance purposes. These devices mimic a cell phone tower in order to trick phones into connecting with them and extract their data.

In 2020 Reporters without Borders released The Uncensored Library, a monumental library inside Minecraft which attempts to circumvent censorship in countries without freedom of the press.

In 1940 the US Army Corps of Engineers started a 200 acre scale replica of the Mississippi river basin. The goal was to flood the model with water to see how flooding would affect the larger, real territory. At the time, this was the most efficient way to simulate the flood.

In 2017 the line to see Japanese artist Yayoi Kusama's Infinity Mirror stretched all the way around a Manhattan city block, the end of the line even meeting up with the beginning at the entrance to David Zwirner Gallery. The wait was as long as six hours.

In 2018, David Reinfurt gave a 18 hour performative lecture compressing a full semester of his Princeton graphic design curriculum. The event was documented and its transcript formed the basis of his book A *New* Program for Graphic Design.

In 2003, Eva and Franco Mattes set up a fake Nike advertisement campaign together with a hi-tech container installed in a public square in Vienna. The news went out nationwide: “Karlsplatz, one of Vienna’s main squares, is soon to be renamed Nikeplatz, and a huge monument in the shape of Nike’s Swoosh logo will be built in Nikeplatz”.

In 1937 the Magic Mirror was featured in Disney's film Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs. Within it dwells an imprisoned spirit who always speaks the truth. The Evil Queen holds ownership of the mirror, and primarily exploits its power to ensure that she remains the fairest in the land.

Mirror Schools