Rigid Waves operates a disjunction of self from mirror image or, rather, of mirror image from self, thereby replacing the integrationist operation of mirror identification with the disintegrationist creation of autonomous self-images—images of the self unstuck from the self they image. The mobile spectator is empowered to control the changes the image undergoes, but cannot coincide visually with the image (because movement generates distortion) or touch the image (because proximity causes the image to shatter into pieces).
Situating perception between two perceptual limits (the distance required to see, on the one hand, and the distance required to touch, on the other), Rigid Waves thus liberates the self, as the artists proclaim, in an act of dispossession that leaves motility as compensation for loss of visual mastery. Their anxious query—"How will I ever recognize myself again?"—expresses the structure of transcendence inherent in motility as an existential dimension of human being. Because movement always displaces the self, thus preventing it from coinciding with itself, movement can only provisionally—or, perhaps better, only partially—compensate for the loss of visual identification.
Not surprisingly, the second installation, Liquid Views: The Virtual Mirror of Narcissus (1993), aims to complete this compensation (See Figure 0.3). It does so by coupling motility (specifically, tactile motility) directly with the deformation of the mirror image so that the viewer never loses control over the disintegration of the (self-)image. Thus, if Rigid Waves works to unfasten the self-image from the self (and vice versa), Liquid Views proffers a compensatory interface that reasserts—albeit, on radically different sensory terms—the embodied viewer's control over the body-image correlation. Again, let us allow the artists to describe the work:
INTRODUCTION
17