each is also a mirror-image of the other, albeit a refracted,
catoptricIn a tradition originally derived from Roger Bacon's claims about the powers of
catoptric glasses, early modern philosophers such as Thomas Digges repeatedly tell stories about the telescope's power as tool for reading distant texts.
After 1980 he began making strange little dioramas on the side, exquisitely evocative miniature sensoriums, several of them featuring the same stereoscopic viewing device modeled on the
catoptric (or so-called beam-splitting) camera that he'd subsequently deploy in his Iguassu Falls display.
The press release described the show as "a kind of Modernist Hall of Mirrors," and while some of the works reinforced this
catoptric organizational logic, at heart the sentiment was a weak attempt to thematize the grouping of otherwise diverse experiments.