[artinfo] Mirror. Medium. Art

[Media Art Database]

Mirror. Medium. Art. On the History of Mirror in 
the Age of Image (Slavko Kacunko)

The discovery of the mirror not only brought 
humankind closer to itself but also propelled it 
farther into the infinity of the universe than 
any other medium. As a medium of self-knowledge, 
the mirror’s self-reference set the limit to its 
scholarly apprehension – self-reference as the 
great subject of all psycho-analytically informed 
approaches to research. As a void in the 
apprehension of the world, the mirror obtained a 
scholarly perspective and the more so in areas 
beyond its own qualities as a medium, i.e. in 
images and metaphor, the paradigms of all 
research looking to image and text.
This investigation sets out to comprehend 
paradoxes of this kind as the marks of a 
meta-complex of method out of which new models of 
the image continually arise. The waxing 
intangibility of proliferating images be they of 
the mind, in dreams, through gestures, and the 
equally rampant growth of microstructuring in 
allocations of knowledge lay a challenge before 
any aspiration to apply them to transdisciplinary 
and meta-medium phenomena. The mirror is an apt 
instrument to question such concepts to the core. 
As a scholarly framework, the problems posed by 
the mirror through history, as a meta-medium of 
visuality, serve well. Thereby, too, the 
mirroring / reflection in its non-metaphorical, 
catoptric sense should be comprehended as a 
fourth cultural technique which, alongside the 
word, image and number, has merited the epithet 
of ‘culture-endowing’.


Wilhelm Fink Verlag 2010
ISBN  978-3-7705-5007-4