“Radiance.” Image credit: Matt Elson
An Infinity Box built by Los Angeles-based artist Matt Elson isn’t complete until people duck inside. Once they cross the threshold, the interior transforms into an immersive kaleidoscope flecked with candles, colored lights, and paper flowers. Whether the viewers laugh at their own reflections or gawk in wonder, the walls respond with endless variations of their shifting expressions—and if one person decides to stay inside while his or her viewing partner leaves, another spectator will pop in and transform the exhibition into something totally new.
Sticking your head into a cramped, dimly-lit box probably seems like it would be an isolating experience, but Elson, 59, insists his work is all about fostering human connection. Most pieces are built to fit two to four people’s heads at a time, and once they pop their heads inside, they embark on a shared journey through the artist’s psychedelic landscapes. “It’s really about being present with another person,” Elson tells mental_floss. “And it’s about being in the moment right here, right now, not distracted with anything else.”
Elson has come a long way since his first try at an Infinity Box, which he built as an art student at the Pratt Institute. The foamcore sculpture had eye-holes for viewing two fields of mirrors at once. It was designed in such a way that it was impossible for the viewer’s eyes to rest on a single focal point. “There were several different experiments going on at the same time,” Elson says. “[It caused] massive confusion for the brain with a sort of seasick feeling afterward.”
After he graduated from Pratt in 1982, Elson transitioned from physical art to computer graphics, receiving a Masters of Computer Applications at the New York Institute of Technology in 1987. Three years later, when he relocated to Los Angeles for his career, he left the experimental box from his art school days behind.
Elson spent the next two decades working for some of the entertainment industry’s biggest companies. He was at DreamWorks during the studio’s launch and assisted in Disney’s transition from 2D to 3D animation. But even after all his successes, the artist felt out of his element in front of a monitor. “I was tired of making things in small dark rooms by myself,” he says. So he went back to making fine art paintings like he’d learned to do as an undergraduate student.
And then a trip to Burning Man made him reconsider mirrors as a medium.
Every year, tens of thousands of people participating in Burning Man build a temporary community in Nevada’s Black Rock Desert and hold a week-long festival of art, electronic music, and “radical self-expression,” all leading up to the symbolic burning of a towering, wooden effigy of their namesake mascot. Elson attended in 2010, and while wandering through the desert displays, he came across a piece created by artist Manu Kaleido. KaleidoAct used moving lights, shadows, and puppetry reflected in a large mirrored space to alter the viewer’s sense of reality.
Inspired, Elson went home and started playing with the materials on a much smaller scale. One of the first things he did was hold two mirrors back-to-back and bring them up to his face. “That bifurcates the field of view,” he explains. “You get all this anomalous information that’s in conflict and your brain’s trying to make sense of it.”
Using that concept as a starting point, Elson began construction on a full-sized box in April of 2012. Unlike creating something in a computer program, putting a box together required a true physical connection to his work. His decades of tech experience did come in handy, however. Since building his first box as a student, he’d learned geometry concepts from animating computer graphics that made planning out 3D structures a lot easier. He used that knowledge to design pieces that were as coherent and seamless in their final forms as they were when he envisioned them.
He was so eager to show off the first box in the Infinity Box series—appropriately titled Infinity Box No. 1—that he put together a quick version made from plywood and Gatorfoam within a month to display at a Thai massage parlor in Santa Monica. He finished an updated model of Infinity Box No. 1 made from wood and masonite a year later.
Elson has built 14 boxes in the years since, and that’s not including the replicas of his original designs. They’ve been showcased at Burning Man, the Science Museum in London, and most recently at the Hall of Magic in Brooklyn during an exhibit promoting the Syfy series The Magicians. According to Elson, more than 220,000 people have experienced his creations at his shows alone, and he has noticed similar patterns from the people who view them.
“What I really love is when I see people … put their heads in a box and they’re there for 10 or 15 minutes just having a conversation,” Elson says. “The average length of time a person spends in front of a painting or a sculpture in a museum is on the border of a few seconds. They’re very short experiences, [but] people tend to really take their time with these [boxes].”
Different boxes evoke different themes. His sixth box, Radiance, is based on the story from the Bhagavad Gita, the Hindu scripture in which Krishna reveals his universal form to Arjuna. “Arjuna saw the Universal Form of the Lord with many mouths and eyes, and many visions of marvel, with numerous divine ornaments, and holding divine weapons,” the passage reads. “Arjuna saw the entire universe, divided in many ways, but standing as (all in) One (and One in all) in the body of Krishna.”
The spirit of this story is what Elson aimed to capture in the box, which is a consistent crowd-pleaser. Viewers are treated to one of two perspectives, depending on which side they enter: One side, representing order, is covered with flowers and electric candles; the other side, representing chaos, is shot through with swirling rainbow lights. The mirrors are positioned in a way that slices the occupant’s face into 11 separate reflections.
“It takes a beautiful picture, and I think that’s one of the things people like about it,” Elson says. “But for me, it’s a deeper metaphorical layer of looking at the person and seeing the many aspects of them.”
After working on his Infinity Boxes for five years, Elson is now planning to turn them into something even more engrossing. For his next project, he’s fully embracing the carnival funhouse concept and building pieces out of full-sized shipping containers. Participants will be able to walk inside the boxes and see reflections of their whole bodies scattered across the walls.
By completely enveloping the senses, Elson hopes the boxes will compel viewers to slow down and live in the present. “That’s the real goal,” he says. “Creating a space for people to be aware of their lives.”
February 15, 2017 – 10:30am