“WHAT IS THE PURPOSE OF THE AZTEC MIRROR ? Not to see oneself, but to lose oneself. Not to find oneself, but to disappear. In fact, most ancient mirrors were like that.” (Andrés Ibañez, Through the Mirror)

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In the Coyo ayllu (Atacama), the sky is reflected by a black-dyed water mirror, captured by an overhead camera recording the image. An electric motor rotates the water container, generating a stationary forced vortex that curves the water’s surface into a paraboloid of revolution. The result is a parabolic mirror whose angular velocity is directly related to its concavity, and consequently, to the angular distortion of the reflected sky image.

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The image is broadcast live to Linz (Austria) as part of the Studio(dys)Topia exhibition at the 2022 Ars Electronica Festival, where a video installation projects it onto a circular surface raised a few centimeters above the floor of a darkened room. The presence and movements of viewers approaching the installation are captured by a second camera, converted into data, and processed in real time. This data is then sent back over the internet to influence the rotation speed of the apparatus in Coyo. An intimate yet distant entanglement is established: by linking the number of attendees at the video installation to the angular velocity of theapparatus, a situation arises where people observing the image in one hemisphere collectively and unintentionally affect the behavior of the machine producing theimage in the other hemisphere.

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Liquid Sky becomes the techno-mediated opening of a portal, where the real-time image of the Atacama sky, the attendees of the Ars Electronica Festival, and a network of machines, mechanical gestures, natural forces, algorithms, and data flows intertwine in a trans-local, rhizomatic feedback loop. Within this loop, the distinctions between the involved entities dissolve into an extended present moment of mixture and interconnection.