NARRATOR: 

At first glance, Dan Graham’s “Opposing Mirrors and Video Monitors on Time Delay” seems to be a very simple set-up. Two television monitors and two cameras are located in a room, each facing a mirror. The first complication occurs in the way the placement of the mirrors directly across from each other creates a view of infinite regression. But it also has to do with the physical space that it occupies. Here’s Dan Graham. 

GRAHAM:  

It also has a lot to do with the space itself. It’s a Golden Mean rectangle. It’s a six-seconds time delay, and it takes six seconds to walk from one side to the other. So it’s very much about the space itself. 

NARRATOR: 

We invite you to become part of the piece. You can experience yourself in real time; and then see a bit of your own past – from six seconds before – on the television monitor.  
 

GRAHAM: 

I think you’ll find some people reacting to the image of themselves being seen by other people, and I have to say when I was fourteen I read Jean Paul Sartre’s “Being and Nothingness” and he said that the ego is formed by a small child seeing somebody else seeing them, as they see another person. So it’s all intersubjective space.