DANIEL ROZIN: FrameRates
October 21–December 10, 2024
Curated by Lorraine Walsh
Simons Center Gallery
Opening Reception: Thursday, November 21, 2024, 5:00 pm
5:00 pm: Reception, Simons Center Gallery and SCGP Lobby
5:30-6:30 pm: Artist Talk: Daniel Rozin’s Digital Interactive Art. SCGP Room 102
The Simons Center for Geometry and Physics is honored to present a solo exhibition featuring artwork by Daniel Rozin.
For almost three decades, Daniel Rozin has been exploring interactive mechanisms of reflection and perception. He creates and writes custom software with mechanical engineering while utilizing a wide range of material for installation, sculpture, and screens. Within Rozin’s impressive range of material––from furry puff balls to chopsticks––he considers what constitutes an image through interactive art allowing for an incredibly unique visitor experience.
Rozin is interested in uncanny materials—a challenge he implements as an artistic advantage. Assembling these discrete and unusual components, he creates interactive experiences into moving moments that “mirror” the viewer in their likeness. The kinetically dynamic “mirrors” are reflective, and often surprising to the visitor, responding to a person’s presence via a camera and physical computing or custom software in real-time. Accordingly, reflection and surface transformation become a means to explore human behavior, presence, and representation in Rozin’s art.
In FrameRates, Rozin is investigating one of the foundational attributes of interaction—time or speed. The speed with which an interactive object responds to the viewer determines the nature of the interaction. The pieces in the show were chosen to demonstrate a range of speeds (frame rates) from super slow, immediate, to more accelerated paces.
Demonstrating these properties are four of Rozin’s works featured in the gallery, including one of his most recent titled Contour Mirror (2024). Exemplifying the artist’s unique analysis of form and outline, Contour Mirror is made of two columns of carbon fiber tubes crowned with contrasting yellow caps highlighting the end of each tube. When a viewer stands in front of the sculpture, all tubes respond in a choreography that aligns their yellow ends to portray the viewer’s outline.
Another recent work is Take Out – Chopsticks Mirror (2021). Here, Rozin reconfigures a familiar dining utensil into an element for a rare choreographic movement. Although the artwork is intrinsically mechanical, it attempts to display the viewer by echoing the fluidity of their motion. The resulting depictions are interactive images investigated through the constraint of one-dimensional linear objects. This sculpture acts as an experiment beyond the mirror, inviting reactions from the piece itself, such as gestures of friendliness, surprise, and coyness, in addition to generative routines and sonic compositions.
Featured in PomPom Mirror (2015) are 928 fake fur puffs controlled by hundreds of motors that react to cameras monitoring people or objects that come in front of it. Turning the spheres from their beige side to their black side and back again, the mirror is able to trace someone moving an arm, or even trail the effect of sunlight passing across its surface.
Finally, in Darwinian Rotating Lines Mirror (2014), Rozin was inspired by evolutionary ideas to dynamically drive the work to resemble the viewer’s mirrored image. Engaging the visitor with interactive response, it also reflects on formal aesthetic properties of line, luminosity, and tempo. The basis of his programming in this series is Darwin’s theory of random mutations followed by natural selection as the basis of evolution.
Daniel Rozin (b. 1961) is an artist, educator, and developer. He lives and works in New York City. Exhibitions of Rozin’s work include the Reina Sofia National Museum, Madrid, Spain; Victoria and Albert Museum, London, England; The Garage CCC, Moscow, Russia; The Hermitage St. Petersburg, Russia; NTT InterCommunication Center, Tokyo, Japan; The Israel Museum, Israel, Jerusalem; Milwaukee Art Museum, Milwaukee, WI; Whitworth Art Gallery, Manchester, England; Taiwan National Museum of Fine Art, Taichung, Taiwan; Barbican Centre, London, England; CAM Raleigh, Raleigh, NC; Art Gallery of Nova Scotia, Halifax, Canada; Bunkamura Museum of Art, Tokyo, Japan; Perot Museum of Nature and Science, Dallas, TX; Katonah Museum of Art, New York, NY; ICA Portland, Portland, ME; the Central Academy of Fine Arts Museums, Beijing, China, Ringling Museum of Art, Sarasota, FL; the Peabody Essex Museum, Salem, MA; and the Sundance Film Festival, Park City, UT. Rozin is Professor of Art, ITP Department of the Tisch School of the Arts at NYU.
Special thanks to bitforms gallery, 131 Allen Street, NYC
Contour Mirror, 2024
96 carbon fiber tubes, motors, control electronics, computer, camera, custom software
60 x 8 x 4 in / 152.4 x 20.3 x 10.2 cm
Courtesy of Daniel Rozin and bitforms gallery. Photo: Tyler Rutledge
Take Out – Chopsticks Mirror, 2021
Chopsticks, motors, wood, custom software, computer, camera
66 x 34 x 17 in / 167.6 x 86.4 x 43.2 cm
Edition of 3, 1 AP
Courtesy of Daniel Rozin and bitforms gallery.
Photo: Emile Askey
PomPom Mirror, 2015
Custom software, faux fur pom poms, motors, control electronics,
motion sensor, computer, wooden armature
48 x 48 x 18 in / 121.9 x 121.9 x 45.7 cm
Edition of 3, 1 AP
Courtesy of Daniel Rozin and bitforms gallery. Photo: John Berens