Project Double Mirrors CD-ROM Review, 9/26/03

(c) 2003 Jonathan M. Hamlow

"Warning," reads the message opening the introduction to the interactive
multimedia CD-ROM Project Double Mirrors, "this CD-ROM contains the
Meaning of Life."

The meaning of life. It is a cliché, an incantation, often the pitch for
a con, always an enigma. Ask, "what is meaning?" "What is life?" Four
years and a hundred thousand dollars later you may possess a piece of
paper asserting your credentials as a philosopher; it is unlikely you will
be any closer to an answer (perhaps, even, to a meaningful question).

Any attempt to capture, in some concrete form, the meaning of life will
end up being one of two things. It will be a god-awful mess, displaying
all the dogmatism and empty adherence to mumbo-jumbo that plague every
movement and religion of the human race. Or else it will be a glorious
mess, capturing the transient yet eternal spark of existence that can be
talked about but never named, thought about but in the end only truly
lived and experienced.

Project Double Mirrors by artist and musician Dylan Tauber is a glorious
mess. It is suffused with humanity and full of extended instants of
brilliance and transcendence tempered by all the neurosis and doubt of a
visionary human existing in a time and place where vision is at best
unrecognized, at worst exploited or attacked.

A word or two about the format. The work is created in an older version
of Macromedia(r) and runs fairly well on my Macintosh, though the program
hangs up now and again and on one occasion crashed my computer all the way
to requiring a hard reboot (then again, so did The Matrix DVD), though
with no ultimate ill effect. Some of the chunkier animation and
transitions have a definite "old school" feel that I find I prefer to the
sort of bland and bubbly Flash(r) and Shockwave(r) effects that seem to be
making almost every arty website feel the same to me these days. The
navigation is fairly straightforward but a degree of intuitive surfing is
necessary.

The main content of the CD-ROM consists of eight extended multimedia works
as well as two musical sets, a slide show of images and an interactive
collage. Musical, visual and conceptual themes are repeated and amplified
throughout each of the multimedia pieces, but each one stands as complete
work which combine to present a powerful tale of the history and travels
of an individual's quest for meaning, and his journeys carrying the
answers he finds into wider worlds of experience and interaction.

Ben Galim

A dreamy, oceanic techno soundtrack is spiked with snatches of recorded
musings of the artist on the quest for self-realization (to become a "full
Jedi, full dolphin, man of God"), recordings of the poet Dylan Thomas, and
samples of dialog from a film about as well as recordings of Bruce Lee
(images, text and recordings of the unorthodox philosophy of the late
movie actor and martial arts master are a recurring theme throughout
Project Double Mirrors). Ben Galim transposes images of the artist as a
young boy and a young adult, his mother, dolphins, a beautiful Ethiopian
woman and scenes of Israel. The ubiquitous symbol of the regressive
illusion of infinity created by parallel mirrors appears as a movie of a
webcam pointed at the screen of a computer which displays the image it
records, creating a strange time-delayed repetition of a single finger,
pointing, overlaid with images of dolphins and backed by a sound collage
of the artist explaining the nature of his quest and underwater sounds.
More than any other composition in Project Double Mirrors it evokes the
sense of the cardinal points of childhood, family, the path to vision and
selfhood, and the creation of the work itself as a means to draw history
through the lens of experience into a unified expression. To me it seems
the most fitting introduction to all the other works on the CD-ROM

Sarah

Sarah is a fugue of sensual, dark and often distorted images of young
woman whose face carries a mixture of cruelty, jaded experience, and
guarded pain and longing beyond her apparent years. The soundtrack, a
remix of Nine Inch Nails combined with a hypnotic loop of a telephone
answering machine message, could be read as a dated and cliched
presentation of an overused piece of cultural detritus (this could be a
personal observation - Nine Inch Nails is not my favorite band). But it
avoids this pitfall in its flawless evocation of how certain music becomes
inextricably intertwined with memory and the personalities of certain
individuals who cast long shadows on our histories. The journal excerpts
that accompany the movie present a more pragmatic narrative of two
individuals in a doomed relationship shaped by radically conflicting
pathologies and carried out through the warping influence of drugs both
prescribed and proscribed. While this view demystifies to some extent the
more lyrical poetry of the Sarah movie, in the end it sharpens its sense
of loss and longing. In presenting the twisted reflection of academic
life in that most resonant of fleshpots, New York City, Sarah serves as a
catalyst for central themes of the quest for a life of balance and
sustained vision.

New York City

A long photo-collage of scenes of New York accompanied by driving, looped
techno beats reinforces Sarah's more personal portrayal of the dark heart
of the city and American culture. New York City contains the usual
iconography of cities - street scenes, homeless people, cops and crowds,
street musicians, night traffic and buildings. These are interspersed
with less orthodox images - scenes of abstract reflections in standing
water on streets and sidewalks, repeated images of a street vendor who
seems to be selling a rocket launcher, and towering racks of magazines and
pornography that evoke a glossy and corrupt world in their own right. New
York City is a point of departure, an exit from the conventional world and
an introduction to the world of the vision quest.

Assassination

Israel, both as the traditional spiritual center for the artist, a young
Jewish man, and as a symbolic locus of the spiritual quest of humanity,
provides the locale and driving influence of the next four multimedia
pieces in Project Double Mirrors. Assassination is a fitting introduction
to this quatrain, focusing as it does on the murder of Prime Minister
Rabin, an event which echoes through the political realities of Israel to
this day and exemplifies the conflict the artist describes as the clash of
the "Old Jews" of the conservative and insular Jewish orthodoxy and the
"New Jews" of Israel's younger and more inclusive population (Rabin was
killed by a lone Jewish gunman in reaction to his quest to seek peace with
Palestine and in the Middle East region in general). A shorter piece,
Assassination (A Tribute to Prime Minister Rabin) consists of video news
clips and still images of the funeral of Rabin, a scene of an earlier
assault by his eventual killer, and his signing of the historic peace
accord with Yassir Arafat which now seems so distant in the past. A
somber music track and a repeated audio clip of a breaking news
announcement of Rabin's death completes the presentation of this recent
tragedy.

Old Jew

The artist refers to himself repeatedly, in the identity he seeks to
transcend, as an "Old Jew." This title carries both a literal and a
symbolic meaning: the "Old Jew" is representative not just as a literal
population and ideology existing among the Jewish people, particularly in
Israel, but also as a symbol of how each of us carries the snares of our
personal histories and societal pressures to conform to conventional
definitions of success and spiritually empty religions and ideologies.
Old Jew combines these meanings in a blend of scenes of modern day Israel,
images from the artist's past history, and elements of American popular
culture. A driving electronic soundtrack goes along with images of Israel
dominated by orthodox Jews in traditional attire and forelocks. Then the
piece shifts gears as it weaves scenes from the Star Wars Trilogy,
focusing on the final conflict between Luke Skywalker and his father Darth
Vader (there is a less than subtle correlation between Vader and the
artist's own father) under the eyes and influence of the evil Emperor,
scenes of the artists early education and home life (including a totemic
and oft-repeated image of the artist's mother that crops just below the
chin and just above the chest and seems to carry an emotional weight that
is never fully explained), and a recording of what seems to be a family
argument about the artist's education. The cumulative effect is a fierce
portrayal of a tangled web of family, religion and personal history, a
Gordian knot the artist must slash through in a fight to cast his "inner
demons" behind and rise to a new fate. The journals that accompany this
relate the artist's interpretation of the spiritual significance of Israel
(an interpretation that is controversial and arguable, an aspect of the
piece that will be addressed in greater depth later), as well as a heavily
edited component on the artist's family. Given the heavy presence of
family imagery in the Old Jew movie, the choice to censor the material on
family is one of the few artistic decisions in the overall work that I
question.

New Jew

The images of the New Jew communicate a vision of the possibility of
spiritual and national transcendence out of the quagmire of the "Old Jew."
As such it is a critical and pivotal work in the overall whole. For all
this, the introduction to the multimedia collage is one of the weaker
components of Project Double Mirrors. Many of the images that are invoked
- the yin and yang, symbols of evolution transposing primates, a muscular
man's flexing biceps, hourglasses - are too literal and cliché. They
suggest a juxtaposition of opposites without shades of gray and too simple
of a transition from the old to the new. The work gathers momentum,
however, as it transitions into a grainy clip of documentary footage on
the Yom Kippur battle, the invasion of Israel by unified Arabic forces in
the early seventies that was so critical in shaping the modern day
dynamics of the Middle East. Scenes from the Old Jew piece are reiterated
backed by a soundtrack of Israel pop music. Later, recordings of Dylan
Thomas reading ("Do not go gently...") over Bob Dylan's "The Times, They
Are A'Changing" is surprisingly affecting. It leads to the best part of
the work, a series of photographs of Israelis, often young, that are
filled with beauty, love and life. Too often Israel is presented in the
media as a symbol and stereotype. It is a center of political strife, a
political agency where the power plays of west and east are endlessly
reiterated. What is missing, and this piece powerfully presents, is the
sense of Israel as a place and a people. Behind the political history and
events of current politics are individuals, striving to live their lives
as we all do, filled with the beauty and essence of life.

The journal selections that go along with the New Jew are the most
extensive and complex of the whole work. As with Sarah, they contain a
complex and intensely personal history that challenges and expands the
images and music it gives rise to. Undoubtedly, some will find fault with
the politics, real or perceived, that this narrative contains.
Fundamental questions about the degree to which Israel itself is
responsible for the political crisis of the Middle East are not really
addressed, nor is the situation of the incredible poverty and deprivation
of Palestine. The artist's vision of the spiritual renewal of Israel
exists in sharper contrast today, as the deadly exchange of violent
confrontations has created a push towards conservatism in politics and the
possibility of peace seems in some ways farther away than it has been in
the past decade. But the writing is not really about the politics of the
Middle East. Israel exists in these writings as a home and a real place,
not simply an exercise in national politics. Like the photographs, the
writing presents Israel as a reality that belies simple classification
according to stale ideologies and partisan conflicts. Mirroring this
complexity are the most personal presentations of the artist's conflicts
with his family. Here, the symbolic images of characters like Vader or
the cold cropped portrait of the Mother are replaced with real human
beings: flawed, passionate, isolated yet seeking communication, however
imperfectly. It is a multifaceted collection of fragments that seems to
leave out as much as it contains. Recurrent conflicts over money, the
family's lack of respect and understanding of the unorthodox path the
artist has chosen, and the artist's resistance of his mother's obsessive
and dominating pathologies and his father's adherence to the materialistic
intellectualism the artist rejected in the academic realm (and intimations
of the possibility of his father threatening to appropriate elements of
his work, a conflict which seems to have been resolved but is never fully
explained) frame the artist's wanderings through Israel, sharing his
radical philosophies with everyone he meets and seeking the essence of his
true path.

The Visionary

A solitary man who lives on the beach, clad in the simplest wrapping of
cloth. He seems something out of fiction, an obscure and rootless hermit
who recognizes a kindred spirit in the artist and delivers terse
pronouncements to him. Of wisdom? Of madness? The Visionary is the most
enigmatic figure in Project Double Mirrors, and his central importance is
seen in his recurring presence throughout all of the multimedia works.
The introduction of this piece is a fascinating choice - the climactic
battle from the Bruce Lee film Enter the Dragon where Lee faces his
adversary in a hall of mirrors. His bloodied fist smashing mirror after
mirror, shattering illusion, revealing his true foe. The Visionary is one
of the more direct pieces in the project. Images of the Visionary
himself, praying, dancing, lost in contemplation play against scenes of
more conventional preachers holding forth with pamphlets in hand, computer
generated simulacrum of a figure mirroring the poses of the visionary in
photographs, or seated in the lotus position. Behind this loops a
monotonous, eventually irritating repetition of a line from a once popular
song - "yeah, yeah, God is great... yeah, yeah, God is good..." The
textual accompaniment of the piece contains a sharp division between the
simple advice uttered by the Visionary and the restless quest of the
artist. The Visionary tells the artist to dive under the ocean until he
needs to breathe and then dive deeper, to "forget the past and dance."
The artist recounts his search for the Ethiopian Woman, a vision of beauty
(and an undisguised picture of contrast to the specter of his mother), a
quest which seems firmly rooted in the desire to revise a past moment of
lost opportunity. In one of the most repeated images in the project the
Visionary makes an obscure gesture, hands poised on either side of his
face with index fingers pointing straight into the air. The artist offers
a philosophical interpretation of the significance of this gesture which I
find myself questioning: mimicking the gesture myself, seeing what it
feels like, I wonder if he is not presenting the artist with a somewhat
whimsical mirror of himself: camera poised in front of his face, the
blinders on, neck canted forward, focused on the image in the viewfinder.
But what do I know, except that I'm the last person to deny that the
advice of visionaries can be hard to take. People like the Visionary
entice and frighten us, sadden us like the advice of Jesus saddened the
rich young man: that there was nothing left for him to do on his spiritual
quest but to give everything he owned to the poor and follow. The
Visionary lives in a place we only visit.

Double Mirrors

Of this final multimedia piece, which includes a direct, written
exploration of the "Theory of Double Mirrors" which is woven and embedded
throughout every aspect of the project, I will say little. It is best
experienced for itself. I will say that it forms a single body of images,
words, and music that is greater than the sum of its parts. I will also
say that the written exposition of the theory of double mirrors is,
perhaps inevitably, something of an anticlimax. As the artist warns
repeatedly through an excerpt of the writings of Bruce Lee, a few
paragraphs can at best only ever be a finger pointing at the moon - and
the seeker for truth must be admonished not to focus so fixedly on the
finger - so as to lose sight of "all that heavenly glory." To me, Double
Mirrors is a fitting summation and conclusion of this truly original
artifact.

-=-

I've spent as many hours with Project Double Mirrors as I have with most
any DVD or video game I've ever owned, and have found it rewards multiple
exposures. An electronic voice advises you, on exit, "so now you feel the
power of man-machine," and it is not just idle talk. It is a true
multimedia work, something that, given the times we live in, is still a
surprising rarity.

So does it contain the meaning of life? I will say, I'm quite certain
that it contains the life of meaning, and leave it for other seekers to
decide exactly what I might mean by that.

Deep in the utterly American urban heart of Minneapolis, Minnesota, too
far from the ocean of my California childhood and my earliest memory, I
leave the machine with its glowing screen for a moment to step outside.
And looking up into a blank gray nighttime sky, praying for rain, I am
reminded once again that there is only the dance.

God is great.

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