A Multimedia Installation exhibited at the Attleboro Arts Museum.
← THE MIRROR BOX
At the heart of the installation is the Mirror Box: four mirrors facing inward, tapering down to a 27-inch television monitor.
I had been exploring this concept for over 15 years. Until this piece, the Mirror Box felt more like a polished science experiment than a resolved artwork. But as a component within a larger multimedia narrative, it finally found its context.
I used the compounding of refracted light within the box as the catalyst. The resulting “rupture” served as a metaphor for the breakdown of boundaries between parallel realities—offering a brief, poetic exposure of cyberspace’s invisible structure.
This piece marked a turning point in my creative inquiry. It was the beginning of an idea I would pursue for years: that art can be rooted in a lie. The lie liberates the imagination, allowing us to entertain the implausible—and in doing so, often arrive closer to the truth.
I later used this exact Picasso quote in my only foray into painting. That piece, titled “Picasso Wired“, remains the only work in that series that I refuse to sell.
BACKGROUND
My fascination with visualizing cyberspace began in the early 1990s after reading Neuromancer by William Gibson and founded artnetweb in 1992. The desire to invert assumptions and discover hidden dimensions has run through my practice since the late 1970s.
I recall a 1978 sculpture—a six-foot diameter sphere clad in a Disney-like toy world. Through cutout windows, viewers could peer inside to see a darker, more complex collage of headlines and real-world chaos. (See: Toy Globe)
This installation follows a similar logic, though with a more sophisticated lens. The Mirror Box peers into the entertainment industry’s vision of emerging realities. The accompanying video features a stream of imagery from internet-era TV commercials and sci-fi films like Lawnmower Man and Johnny Mnemonic.
The Rupture
Through this rupture, I invite viewers to experience an alternate reality—a future that’s fast approaching.
In my view, this rupture will occur when cybernetics catalyzes a profound shift in human evolution, comparable to the leap made at the dawn of Homo sapiens. The drive to merge computer and body is as instinctual as the first time we wielded tools to extend our strength.
Nanotechnology will one day amplify cognition, leading to the emergence of a new kind of human being. Peering through the cracks in the wall, viewers catch glimpses of this coming transformation—overexposed neural networks, synthetic skins, hydraulic systems, and bio-integrated circuitry.
My intention is to look directly into the science of the future—and yes, it is both terrifying and breathtaking.
3/28/2025
This morning I was reading I Am a Strange Loop by Douglas R. Hofstadter. It brought back memories of reading Gödel, Escher, Bach in the eighties and nineties, when I was deep in my work with ants and mirror boxes—constructing physical metaphors for consciousness, recursion, and the instability of the self.
Curious about how my ideas might resonate with Hofstadter’s, I asked Molly, my AI assistant, to imagine a conversation between the two of us. She came up with the following dialogue.
Keep in mind: these are not Hofstadter’s actual words, nor are they mine—though they are close to what I might have said. And perhaps, they are what Hofstadter might have said, as imagined through the strange loop of AI.
Setting: A quiet café in Attleboro, Massachusetts. Remo Campopiano and Douglas Hofstadter sit at a corner table, a mirror box placed between you. A looping ant animation plays quietly on a nearby tablet.
You: Doug, I’ve been living with this idea of the mirror box for a while—first in Rupture in Cyberspace, then in Eight-bit Ant Farm. It’s both metaphor and device. A way to fracture perception, reflect identity, and cause the viewer to experience a kind of recursive awareness.
Hofstadter: Ah yes—the mirror box. You’re describing something I often think of as a strange loop. A system that, by moving through levels, seems to return to itself. That recursive dance of symbols, like the way self-reference builds consciousness.
You: That’s exactly it. I use physical objects—like ants in mirrored spaces or pixelated simulations—to trap attention. The viewer sees themselves not just once, but multiplied, reversed, glitched. It’s like forcing the viewer to confront their own feedback loop.
Hofstadter: It’s interesting you mention ants. In Gödel, Escher, Bach, I used the “Aunt Hillary” chapter as a metaphor for emergent intelligence. Ants, as individuals, aren’t aware of the larger patterns they form. But collectively, they are Aunt Hillary—a mind emerging from mindless parts.
You: That chapter stayed with me for years. My ant installations—real ants, artificial ants, even conceptual ants—are ways of externalizing that emergence. The colony becomes a living metaphor for distributed cognition. But the loop doesn’t stop with them—it loops back to the viewer. Who’s observing whom?
Hofstadter: So the viewer becomes part of the system. That’s beautiful. And slightly unsettling. It reminds me of how I see the self—as a hallucination, but a deep one. A strange loop where the symbol “I” is constantly referring back to itself.
You: And in my case, the installations sometimes rupture that loop. Rupture in Cyberspace tried to show what happens when the loop is interrupted—when the code glitches or the simulation collapses. There’s this moment where the viewer senses the artificiality of the whole construct.
Hofstadter: Yes—like a crack in the mirror. Or seeing the back of your own head through a feedback monitor. It can be disorienting, but also enlightening. You begin to question the solidity of the self. That’s where metaphor becomes more than metaphor—it becomes architecture.
You: I’ve always felt that. I started using mirrors as literal tools, but now I see them more like ontological instruments. A mirror box forces recursive thinking. It can simulate empathy, or cause a psychological rupture. It’s therapeutic and dangerous at the same time.
Hofstadter: That’s what I hoped to get across in I Am a Strange Loop. That the self is not a nugget inside the skull, but a system of feedback, a hall of mirrors. The more sophisticated the loop, the more “real” the self feels.
You: And maybe the more unstable. My work has become more about destabilizing that self. Not destroying it, but showing how easily it can bend, split, even loop into others. Maybe that’s where empathy begins—in realizing our loops are entangled.
Hofstadter (smiling): Empathy as entangled recursion. That’s lovely. You and I may be building in different mediums, but we’re carving the same topological grooves. Consciousness, identity, emergence—they’re all just strange loops in different languages.
You: And ants keep marching through them all.
Hofstadter: As they must.
