Interfaces, exh. cat., Tel Aviv Museum of Art, Tel Aviv (2002), Tel Aviv, Tel Aviv Museum of Art, 2002
→Ardenne Paul, « Miri Segal : jeux optiques troubles », Art Press, 2006
Interfaces, Tel Aviv Museum of Art, Tel Aviv, 2002
→Bon voyage, galerie Kamel Mennour, Paris, 2006
Israeli mixed media artist.
Since the late 1990s, Miri Segal has created video installations, photographs and objects that encourage viewers to question what they see before them. Prior to training in visual arts at the Art Institute of San Francisco, she obtained a PhD in mathematics – a discipline to which she owes her taste for the mechanisms of perception and the construction of sense-stimulating illusions. Using video projections, mirror effects and physical experimentation, she constructs staged spaces often suffused with sensuality. Her first pieces make use of interactivity to literally immerse the audience in them. To this end, her medium of choice is less video than the projected image, which allows her to place the viewer’s body at the heart of the field of projection. Her setups are highly original: The Circus of the Beautiful Hours (2005) is a one-user installation in which both the seat and projector complete a full rotation; in Downcast, Autumn Dale (2004), a puddle of water acts as a screen; Beam From Between Your Eyes (2008) is a projection stretched out at an angle, forming an anamorphosis which can only be seen properly from a single point of the room.
In the late 2000s the artist started to explore the virtual world. In 2007 she created the documentary BRB, made using the network game Second Life, and which shows the artist’s avatar moving through the game’s digital landscape, where she creates her own exhibition space. In 2010 she teamed up with Or Even Tov and founded the fictitious company Gooble Inc., a parody of Google, with which they developed the concept of Gmind, a headset computer supposed to operate by reading its user’s thoughts. Like her first installations, this almost realistic fiction adds a layer of augmented reality to our concrete sensory perceptions. Segal’s work has been shown in a number of collective exhibitions, as well as solo shows at the PS1 Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Museum of Art and Dvir Gallery in Tel Aviv, Lisson Gallery in London and Kamel Mennour Gallery in Paris.