Editorial

Hall of Mirrors

by Jean-Baptiste Duret

We create our own reality. The world is a reflection of ourselves.
Those who are looking for this kind of information hear this more and more lately. Fascinated as I am by the exploration of every aspect of consciousness, it is impossible for me to ignore. I wanted to see it for myself, and the potential value of such statements to me. Caught up in photography and other visual arts for a few months, I was also interested by these same aspects in what we call the physical laws. When my sister asked me to join her and the kids on a visit to the Jeff Koons exhibition in the Palace of Versailles, I accepted readily. Versailles is renowned for its Hall of Mirrors composed of “seventeen mirror-clad arches that reflect the seventeen arcaded windows that overlook the gardens”. The artist’s works (mostly using metallic material), the profusion of details of the Palace and the abundance of tourists made it a perfect place to explore these concepts of reflections.

Using the analogy of light and reflective materials I could make parallels with how the world is a reflection of ourselves. Imagine you are a source of light (your energy) and you cast your energy all around in every direction and it is reflected by the world around you. With your perception and your senses (physical or non-physical) you capture the elements of your energy that are returned in your direction.

Beginning simply, the first artworks were metallic and polished and thus had a very high reflectivity. Looking at these sculptures, I could clearly see that the shape of the object and its other qualities (reflectivity, color, granularity, texture…) were influencing which wavelengths of the light were reflected and how they were reflected. We all saw how our faces were distorted, as when we look in a spoon or in one of those fun-house mirrors. Despite the distortions and the coloration of the reflections, the image was still recognizable and I could identify people and objects reflected, or even reflections of reflections if there were mirrors in the room.

With those objects that have a very low reflectivity, it is more subtle. If you have some notions of drawing and painting, you know that the color of an object influences the colors of the surrounding objects in different ways. When an object receives light, it absorbs a part of it and re-emits the other parts —that’s why you perceive some objects as red or others as yellow. But there is another trick with how our senses function and that also creates optical illusions; the surrounding colors influence the perceived colors of an object even if there is no reflection involved; as well, with the repetition of patterns like stripes or concentric circles… You can see more of that on the Internet of course.

So the disposition of objects in space, their shapes, colors, the different lights, the shadows and the movements are all influencing of the picture composed by our perception. The disposition of objects, the lines of a wall, can all suggest different qualities that add depth to the scene.

Looking at the world as a reflection of ourselves and using the information given to us by the laws of physics, we have a way to understand how it is done and this gives us much information about ourselves. Thus, different elements of the objective imagery have different qualities, and as they receive our energy, they absorb a part and re-emit another part with distortions depending on the characteristics of the imagery, so to speak. Some elements, acting like mirrors, would give me very detailed information about what I project in the moment, and other elements will give me more specific information about portions of my energy, always colored and/or distorted by their own specific qualities.

This subject of reflection is a very vast subject and I could easily have written a longer article about it —or maybe a book. But you can have more fun in playing with it yourself. In reading this month’s articles  you may have a brilliant realization of how they are reflecting your own energy and how they are also influencing of one another in their position and in the movement they create.