This is reflection
Motorized reactive and perceptual kinetic sculpture, 2023
Carbonsticks, 3D stainless steel, glass with black foil, wood, various mechanical and electronic components
60 x 170 x 10 cm
This is reflection concludes a trilogy that began with This is air and This is affection – three works dedicated to those elusive moments in which perception takes place. While This is air makes the invisible visible and This is affection explores the relationship between object and observer, This is reflection turns its gaze towards seeing itself – towards light as the very condition of perception, and towards reflection as its echo.
As in David Foster Wallace’s metaphor of the water that surrounds the fish without their awareness, “reflection” here refers both to a physical and a cognitive reflection – to perception as a continuous resonance between world and consciousness.
In front of a horizontal sheet of Parsol glass, carbon rods are arranged closely side by side. The in between visible glass reflects its surroundings – the space, the architecture, the viewers themselves. Within this reflection, reality and image overlap: the environment enters into relation with the play of light and waves across the rods.
The rods reflect the light of the integrated side-mounted sources, creating a horizontal line that extends from one to the next. In a state of stillness, this line appears almost straight – a fragile balance between order and motion. A barely visible, horizontally stretched thread sets the rods in alternating motion. As it moves, the horizontal line of light begins to ripple into a wave-like rhythm.
The movement is controlled by a reactive electronic system that responds to real physical data – to fluctuations in cosmic background radiation, to electromagnetic fields in the room, and to the presence of people and devices nearby. No fixed image emerges, but rather an abstract version of reality: a reflection that does not mirror precisely, but generates through its reactivity a constantly shifting perception – one that cannot be consciously experienced in this form.
This is reflection questions the conditions of perception: what becomes visible when light meets matter – and the moment when this physical process passes through the filter of our perception. As in the earlier works of the trilogy, meaning arises only in the in-between: between stillness and movement, between observation and resonance.
The work lingers in this threshold. It does not present reflection, but the process of reflecting itself – an inseparable fusion of image, resonance, and perception.