Mirror, mirror on the wall,
who is the vainest of them all?
Mirror, mirror on the wall, who is the vainest of them all?
For our final project we built Narcissus to represent the quality: vanity.
We were inspired by the myth of Narcissus, who was so spellbound by his own reflection that he withered away and turned into a flower.
Narcissus suffered from a fatal case of vanity and while people these days don’t stare at their reflection in a river for days on end, they do post about themselves and their lives on social media.
For a lot of people, the approval of others in the form of likes is an important factor to their self-worth. They will be very happy when they get the approval from others and become addicted to gaining this approval. They lose themselves in it and if one day no one expresses their approval of them, they will feel sad and won’t know what to do with themselves.
That is why we decided to represent vanity and its detrimental effects in our artificial creature, aptly named Narcissus.
Narcissus
The concept is simple: when Narcissus is looking at himself in the mirror, he is very happy and will continuously inspect himself. However, when his mirror is taken away, he is sad and still.
It is a very literal translation of the myth of Narcissus, but we also wanted to make clear that the mirror represented external validation and have Narcissus’ self-worth be based on whether he had the validation or not.
We raised two questions to our audience:
Why do you think he is so obsessed with the mirror?
Do you think it would be better for him to remove the mirror?