In Rigid Waves, the acoustic mirroring of Narcissus and Echo is transformed into a visual form. Approaching the mirror, the viewer is confronted with a reflection that does not correspond to normal perception. Only an illusionary visual echo of one's own movements is represented. The "self" is transformed into another - a virtual - body. The participant sees himself or herself as a body with strangely displaced movements, and finally as an image in the mirror that breaks when approached. "The moving viewer can control the changes the image undergoes, but cannot visually coincide with the image because the movement produces a distortion. Nor can they touch the image, because proximity causes it to shatter into pieces.
Rigid Waves is a virtual mirror that captures rather than reflects. The interface places the viewer in the mirror's visual system, a hidden camera within the frame. An algorithm controls the appearance of the reflection by calculating the distance to the viewer. The triggers for the transformation of the reflected images are movement and speed, proximity, and distance. "Rigid Waves operates a disjunction of self from reflection, or rather reflection from self, replacing the integrationist operation of identifying reflection with the disintegrative creation of autonomous self-images-images of the self that are not stocked by the self they image. It is an attempt to look at oneself from the outside or even from behind, to stand next to oneself and discover hidden "selves". There is no such thing as finding ourselves, our "self" is liberated in this broken mirror. Only by "dancing with yourself" can you become yourself. It is in this "dance" that the virtual double reveals itself as a potential reality. The participant is not trapped in a pre-programmed virtual reality machine. Instead, the body is liberated by a decoupling of self-perception and self-image through a performative, immaterial, or imperceptible interface, as in Rigid Waves and its complement, Liquid Views.
Locating perception between two perceptual limits, the distance required to see on the one hand and the distance required to touch on the other, Rigid Waves liberates the self in an act of dispossession that leaves motility as compensation for the loss of visual control. Movement displaces the self, preventing it from coinciding with itself; movement can only temporarily, or perhaps more accurately, partially, compensate for the loss of visual identification.