MirrorMorphose: A Gaze-Diving Experience into the Past, the Other, and the Self

MirrorMorphose is an interactive mirror that uses gaze as an emotional portal between space and time. When the viewer maintains eye contact with their reflection, the image gradually morphs into a childhood version of themselves, a family member, or another person, who stares back and listens carefully, inviting a dialogue across identity and time. Through this slow visual transformation, the project explores how sustained gaze fosters empathy, self-recognition, and the blurring of boundaries between self and other. Drawing from practices of meditation, hypnosis, and therapeutic mirroring, MirrorMorphose proposes the gaze as an active medium of connection, both technological and intimate. The project challenges the viewer to confront their own reflection as a lived encounter, where memory, emotion, and technology intertwine. In doing so, seeing becomes a form of becoming, engaging viewers in having reflections or conversations in a meditative act of meeting oneself through the eyes of another.