Doug Aitken
no history, 2005

Automated mirror sculpture (stainless steel mirrors, electrical motors)
241.3 x 864 x 473 cm
Commissioned by Thyssen-Bornemisza Art Contemporary 


In no history thousands of mirrors come to life, animate, and cast reflections of ourselves into thousands of moving pieces. We experience ourselves moving at the speed of life through images that are reflected back upon ourselves as if in a kaleidoscope in motion. As viewers enter the space they are met with an endless array of slow-moving reflections, projected from hundreds of fragmented mirrors covering the three walls of the room/corridor. These modular, reflective fragments are of varying size, distributed in a manner, which creates graphic patterning on the walls. The mirrors are held a few millimetres from the wall, the movement of each panel is controlled independently by a silent motor, the mechanics of which are hidden behind the wall. The mirrors’ motion mimics the slow ripple of water across the surface of a lake or speeding clouds reflected in a skyscraper. The resulting sense of dynamism is heightened by the positioning of the mirrors on multiple planes, casting back a fragmented image of the viewer and thereby offering them a simultaneous collection of perspectives of themselves. As the surface undulates, the images continually shift, fracture and re-fracture as they replicate themselves in a chaotic order. Spectators thereby come to experience themselves moving in real time as multiple versions of themselves are reflected back upon them in a kaleidoscope of light and motion. "With no history I wanted to explore this sense of motion, change, and flux in relation to how we see ourselves. The work is both an experiment and an offering to the viewer: it’s like what Chet Baker said, “Let’s get lost.” no history is about seeing one’s own image in amplified motion. The work’s content relates back to the viewer who is invited to go more deeply into the representational self by exploring this labyrinth-like work. The hundreds of moving mirrors shift and follow the viewer’s own reflection, inviting one to “re-focus” continuously on different moving perspectives and to fall into an alternative reality. I imagined the work as though it were a film or a movie with scenes and characters, but where the viewer of the work becomes the subject of the “film.” Their reflections move and fragment as if they are becoming their own private film." (the artist in a conversation with Hans Ulrich Obrist)


*1968 in Redondo Beach, USA | Living and working in Los Angeles and New York, USA