Freddie Yauner
Mirror Mask
The Mirror Mask had been sitting around my studio for years.
The idea actually started at the Royal College of Art in 2006, when I was experimenting with panoramic photographs (before anyone could make them on their IPhone) and making strange composite faces from different people. Over the next twenty years I kept coming back to mirrors, faces and technology, slowly developing the idea.
In 2017, What I’m Looking At, or the Mirror Mask as it became known, finally appeared. The basic idea was simple: what if, instead of showing people what you look like, you showed them what you’re looking at?
A broken mirror, a device for seeing what my students were looking at as laptops became a regular thing in lectures. 10 years of development into the form you may recognise today. I started making films with it, partly inspired by the Eames’ experiments with sound, colour and texture.
Then, just before New Year’s Eve 2025, we posted one of them online.
By midnight it had reached a million views.
Eventually it passed ten million.
Suddenly people weren’t just watching the mask. They wanted to use it themselves. So I started sending them out into the world.
And that’s when it became much more interesting…
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