Infinity Mirrored Room at The Broad

This weekend I visited the Broad and checked out Yayoi Kusama’s “Infinity Mirrored Room”. This exhibit is visually interactive which causes an individual to enter a room and feel as if they are the center of never ending galaxy. The exhibit is intimate, only enabling no more than two people into the room at a time while only having 45 seconds in the room itself. This is essential for the technology of the exhibit to work as the exhibit’s effect is to cause an individual to feel as if they have entered a room of infinite space. As I entered the room I walked to the center platform that was surrounded by water as if I was walking through a galactic fishing dock. The room was illuminated by a speckle of colored LED lights of various colors that hung from the ceiling. All the walls surrounding me in the exhibit were mirrors that played a visual trick of space. The reflective nature of the water and mirrors caused me to feel boundless because I could not gage my own depth perception. This caused me to feel as if I were the focal point of the room, floating on what seemed to be an endless amount of stars in this vast Galaxy. The mirrors of the room caused the LED lights to seem to expand and multiply. I then understood that the hanging of the different LED lights was a representation of the different stars that are in our galaxy. It was as if I had traveled to outer space and the speckled lights were the only thing that cushioned my physical presence. Admittedly this exhibit isn’t necessarily adding technology to an already artefact-based exhibition. Instead, the technology is intended to completely immerse the visitor in a different bodily experience. But exhibits that heavily employ technology like this tend to draw a wider audience to the other exhibits in the museum as well, just by bringing people to the museum in the first place.