A look in the mirror: what does it show us - and what does it hide?

A lecture by Johannes Grebe-Ellis

As familiar as the mirror is to us in everyday life, we easily get stuck when we start to ask: Where do we see our reflection - on the mirror, in front of it or behind it? Why does the mirror only swap right and left and not also up and down? Is the mirror deceptive? If these and similar questions are not to be answered theoretically, but from visual experience itself, remembering the law of reflection from physics lessons will not help. Is it possible to develop the law of the mirror based on experience, i.e. from looking into the mirror itself? What kind of seeing would we have to develop for this? We can find answers to this question in art. Artists have always been interested in reflections. We may have learned what an image is from the mirror image. - In this lecture, the physical perspective of the mirror is contrasted with artistic views. In simple experiments, we give mirrors the opportunity to answer our questions and gather experiences in the mirror space.