Our first assignment for this semester was to develop a conceptual book about Peter Greenaway's "Prospero's Books". I chose the Book of Mirrors, which according to Prospero, is " Bound in gold cloth and very heavy, this book has some eighty shining mirror pages, some opaque, translucent, some manufactured with silvered papers, some coated in paint, some covered in a film of mercury that will roll off the page unless treated cautiously. Some mirrors simply reflect the reader, some reflect the reader as he was three minutes previously, some reflect the reader as he will be in a year's time, as he would if he were a child, a woman, a monster, an idea, a text or an angel. One mirror constantly lies, one mirror sees the world backward, another upside down. One mirror holds on to its reflection as frozen moments infinitely recalled. One mirror simply reflects another mirror across a page. There are ten mirrors whose purpose Prospero has yet to define."
I decided that the best way of representing the book of mirrors was to understand mirrors completely. To achieve this task, I began experimenting with different types of mirrors, materials, shapes, and different reflections. These experiments, not only gave me a better understanding of mirrors and their properties, but also gave me plenty of ideas to include in the book of mirrors.
To the right, you can see one of my first ideas, which was experimen
ting with a normal mirror, but blocking certain areas of it, in order for the reader to just be able to reflect some part of his face, instead of all of it. If you flip the page once, another space is opened, and although you can't see your entire reflection, the reader can see something more of his face. If the page is fliped a third time, his entire reflction will be seen through a normal mirror.
These other pictures are of one of my latest ideas, the result of one of my experiments, which began as an experiment of combining mirrors and shapes, and that ended up as the idea of reflection through a shattered mirror. The shattered mirror is represented through uniform shapes and different depths of the mirrors.
To the right, you can see one of my first ideas, which was experimen
ting with a normal mirror, but blocking certain areas of it, in order for the reader to just be able to reflect some part of his face, instead of all of it. If you flip the page once, another space is opened, and although you can't see your entire reflection, the reader can see something more of his face. If the page is fliped a third time, his entire reflction will be seen through a normal mirror.
These other pictures are of one of my latest ideas, the result of one of my experiments, which began as an experiment of combining mirrors and shapes, and that ended up as the idea of reflection through a shattered mirror. The shattered mirror is represented through uniform shapes and different depths of the mirrors.
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