Your Reflection/Change of Direction

Acclaimed filmmaker and new media artist Paul Bojack is set to unveil his latest project, Your Reflection/Change of Direction, a web-based suite of 14 short moving image artworks designed to explore the shifting nuances of contemporary identity. As an artist well attuned to the intricacies of human nature, Bojack brings his unvarnished view of humanity and a passion for experimental narrative form to a series of short conceptual vignettes, each of which invites the viewer literally into the artwork through the use of a webcam. With its use of poetry and kinetic typography, the hybrid media artwork borrows from the tradition of electronic literature, as well as from the tradition of interactive media. However, Your Reflection/Change of Direction is neither e-lit nor interactive artwork or game. Participants do more than read text or view images, and yet, as Bojack explains, there is no interaction other than the viewer’s willingness to turn on their camera. “The exhibit doesn’t exist until the viewer opts in,” he says, underscoring the fact that the piece is relational. Paul Bojack, who worked with programmer Dave Steele, conceived of his new project in late 2019 but began creating it in earnest in April 2020. The eight-month production coincided with a global pandemic, unprecedented government lockdowns, widespread protests against police violence and a national reckoning with American racism. This context is subtly reflected in Your Reflection/Change of Direction, which includes 14 experiences, each of which uses the viewer’s camera as a mirror. Participants see their own image layered into the artwork as it unfolds; a surprising and powerful face-to-face encounter intersects with words, graphics, images, music, and voice, creating an uncanny space in which the self seems to hover both on the viewer’s own screen as well as in some other space online, at once alone and unique, and at the same time out “there” as part of the web-based artwork.