Infinity Zoom
Infinity Zoom is a virtual reality. A riff on Yayoi Kusama’s “Infinity Rooms” and mimicking a VR headset, the viewer peers into a hall of mirrors and falls into an infinite regress. They see their face reflected and refracted endlessly, from every angle.
A confrontation: accepting the vain satisfaction of seeing oneself. A conflict: the discomfort of being seen. First, the viewer delights in their own image. They explore, but never exhaust, the confines of the one cubic foot mirror box.
Play gives way to pause; exploration leads to a painful discovery—Is that what I look like to others?
Before them, a familiar face. Beneath them, a live feed, fixed from behind. A camera points at Infinity Zoom and the viewer, reminding them of the disarming power of perspective, a world outside of the virtual.
How is the subject constituted through a virtual image? How is it fragmented? To look inside Infinity Zoom is to see oneself, at once, as selfie and surveilled. The rear view is an unusual, unexpected, and, for some, unflattering POV, punctuated by a green box that tracks them as they move. There is a fine line between intimacy and invasiveness. The first person view competes with the third person view. The result is simultaneous narcissistic mortification and narcissistic gratification.