Mu Mirror

An art installation for the web that renders the viewer as a shifting field of colored dots, blurring the boundaries between self and other. The piece takes a photo every few seconds, compares each pixel by color similarity, and moves each dot toward the closest matching pixel — dissolving the boundary between self and background until the viewer becomes indistinguishable from the world around them.

Mu Mirror is a modern form of an ancient technology. For thousands of years, Zen has been using koans, or riddles, to encode mental hacks that help people see reality in a new way. Usually, you have to meditate on a koan for a while – and eventually, something just clicks, and you see life differently.

But most people don't have the time or patience to sit on a cushion long enough or to silently chant mu in their minds for months – so I wanted to try and make a piece of digital art that might give them a shortcut.

Where does your body end? Is your hair you? What about when you cut a strand of it off? Let's say your body is your contiguous body, right now, not including clothes. What if we try to draw a 3D boundary around that body, with a large plastic bag – we wrap you up in it and seal it shut. You'd suffocate, die, and cease being "you" in a few minutes. So "you" must include some air, then. And water. And food. And a circulation system.

As we expand the plastic bag's boundary outwards more and more to try and encapsulate all the things that make you you, we realize that any line we draw between you and not you is arbitrary. It's an illusion to believe we are in any way separable from all of existence. A more accurate description might be that you are whatever the stuff is, right where you are, right now. You're an address, in time. We're calling that address you. Because it's handy to label things as discrete, even though in reality, they're not.

Eastern mystics call this non-duality. There is no "self" and "other" if we think about it hard enough. And modern particle physics agrees. The challenge is that it's very difficult to shatter the illusion that we don't have a discreet self. People meditate for hours, days, decades to exist in the state of mind where the true nature of reality is not just logically known, but embodied and felt. I've experienced it a handful of times. It's a rush. And it's incredibly fragile – the moment you see reality this way, it collapses. Because our bodies evolved to believe themselves discrete – it's evolutionarily advantageous to try to sustain your corner of reality.

But what if there were an art installation that could trigger this insight in viewers? How much sweeter would the world be if we realized we weren't in it, we were it?