https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5QiFs2_z9Ek
So I’ve been having this nightmare, that I believe my mind is basing off 1000 Doors, an art insulation I saw back in 2018 here in Melbourne by Christian Wagstaff & Keith Courtney, where they made a series of rooms with different vibes, working to provoke a range of different feelings, what I remember about it most is the sound of a phone ringing in another room, and upon finding the room with the phone it would be ringing somewhere else and the strange overwhelming feeling of ‘not right’ that caused to alarm in my head and make me giggly and unnevered in response, even tho all it was a set of different rooms and a phone ringing. My nightmare decided to swap the door for differnet mirrors, from all walks of life and time periods displaying to me different captured scenes in time.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1xUlZIss94U
And it made me think who invented mirror mazes?
Mirror Mazes messes with that uncanny feeling, put forth most famously by Sigmund Freud (Ya’ll know him the inventor of psychoanalysis ect) Freud argues that we experience a sense of uncanny when a certain trigger brings back repressed childhood conflicts or primitive beliefs that we have overcome but suddenly, seemingly, receive renewed affirmation, the uncanny locates the strangeness in the ordinary. Expanding on the idea, psychoanalytic theorist Jacques Lacan wrote that the uncanny places us "in the field where we do not know how to distinguish bad and good, pleasure from displeasure", resulting in an irreducible anxiety that gestures to the Real.
Mirrors have (to me at least) a vibe about them I'm all about but also scared of the most forbidden kind of mirrors are mirror mazes people. Mirror mazes are one of those strange liminal places, ever since I was little and my love for Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures In Wonderland became my favorite fairy tale mirrors have had a strange magical feeling to me, the way she climbs up upon her mantel and melts through the gleaming silvery mist of the mirror to a land of high nonsense, do you think if we got to witness her version of the story in the land on the other side if there was an equally as baffled version crossed in her place on the other? Because even the ‘living’ things over there still had that reflection in the glass.
Leonardo Da Vinvci In his sketch book he drew plans for a mirror chamber with an octagonal chamber, each with a mirror. This allows an observer to view completely any object placed inside the chamber. One mirror is a hinged door into the chamber with a small viewing hole drilled through it – after that in France 1689 Louis XIV created the famous ‘Galerie des Glaces’ at the palace of Versailles, France, as a young man Peter Stuyvesant visited, he became inspired to build in what is now New York “The House Of Mirrors” charging entrance fees to the public to use it, which got adopted but the carnivals and amusement parks.
Gustav Castan, owner of the Panopticum attaraction in Berlin, is credited with making the first formal attempt at creating a mirror maze, patented in 1888, he came up with the idea to have set specifications that mirrors should be placed at a precise 60-degree angles (or multiples thereof) around one or more sides of equilateral triangles that form various rhombic and hexagonal arrangements, to produce different reflective effects. In his own words, “The primary object of my invention is to provide such an arrangement of mirrors in a room or enclosure as shall cause them, by their reflection of objects suitably located with relation to the mirrors, to present to the vision of a person in the apartment the illusion of a labyrinthian device composed of seemingly endless passages, which appear to him to be freely traversable until he is stopped in his course by an obstructing mirror, from which long passages seem to extend to the right and to the left.”