The Seattle Art Museum will have a permanent change starting this weekend when Aitken reveals his giant LED and glass display called Mirror, which displays continuously changing images to match the surroundings of the museum. Commissioned by the late philanthropist Bagley Wright in 2011, Mirror acts as a living museum outside the Seattle institution, using an enormous collection of moving images captured by Aitken to reflect local life.
Mirror is constructed with one huge glass-covered horizontal band that spans 12 stories of the museum’s northern and western exterior walls, displaying ever-changing images and columns of light that run up and down its façade. Responsive editing software lies at its heart, recognizing surrounding conditions such weather information, traffic density and atmospheric data, and rendering them as images based on timing, composition, camera movement and subject. The images come from hundreds of hours of footage Aitken filmed throughout Seattle, Washington State and around the museum itself. As the building “senses” change in the environment, the screen changes, and because the environment outside the museum will never be truly the same twice, neither will the images on Mirror.
Aitkens says he was inspired to make Mirror by minimalist music composition, to see if a piece of art and architecture could create its own sequences and patterns, and be less predictable.
“I was interested in seeing if there was a way to allow the moving image to create a constantly new and changing composition,” Aitken says. “In Mirror, imagery at times is abstract and moves in an almost musical tempo. The work generates its own tempos and patterns feeding off the landscape, movement, temperature, light or darkness, wind or many other live organic things around it.”
While Mirror is Aitken’s first permanent installation for a public museum, he’s no stranger to creating works on such a large scale. Many of his past projects involve combining urban cultures and rhythm, and exploring how the architecture of a city can live a life of its own. In 2007, Aitken transformed an entire block of Manhattan into a cinematic show with his Sleepwalkers exhibition for The Museum of Modern Art by covering the museum’s exterior walls with projections of ambient landscapes and people sleeping.
With Mirror, Aitken wanted to make a piece of art that would grow by itself, creating a new visualization for every minute of life it reflects. If nothing else, Mirror will be a testament to the ever-changing pace of Seattle as it continues to evolve with the city.
