The technology's original patent was filed in 1887, by the Rev. John Hooker, the man who railed against the evils of prostitution to such an extent that his name became synonymous with it . . . it is indeed a true tale of mirror inversion, to be immortalized by the thing you hate the most. Nevertheless, since these are the origins of the True Mirror®, one can probably discern a moral force behind the contraption. Imagine what Hooker was up against: an era in which decadent and symbolist poets celebrated the mirror as the silvery mystic writing pad on which paeans to artifice and ephemerality were daily written. Everybody was reinventing themselves: men and women of all classes were wearing make-up and outlandish dress made possible by new advances in color dyes. It was the era of the dandy. Wilde, Baudelaire, and Huysmanns chronicled this world no longer tied to natural appearances. Symbolist poets and playwrights explored the mirror as an impossible portal to inverted, dark worlds. And what would be Alice's adventures without the sweet inversions of the looking glass?
The contemporary version of the True Mirror® is now, however, no longer at odds with the zeitgeist. Rather, it reflects a society dependent on self-help techniques and ego-boosting therapeutics. The Walters describe the mirror's effects in terms of real-time feedback loops and positive image assessment; their language is reminiscent of that of early video artists and Polaroid CEO Edwin Land who thought that technology with instant feedback capabilities spurred human evolutionary advance. Polaroid, however, never reached the impossible "time-zero" of truly instant images (the philosopher's stone of Polaroid while Land was in charge), and with a video monitor one's eye constantly tacks back and forth. Plus, there is the information that drops out when a real image is fed through an electronic machine.