"I believe that the source and inspiration for new designs should be, as it always has been, the emotions, expressions, and esthetics of people. The tools to bring these concepts to life have changed over the past centuries. They are changing now. Designers need to be able to use and develop the new tools and language necessary for their expression."

Daniel Rozin's primary goal in all his work is to make people see differently. And he achieves this by creating digital art in which we see our own reflections. As director of research and adjunct professor at NYU's famed Interactive Telecommunications Program at Tisch School of the Arts, Rozin's projects fascinate because of how he harnesses materials we know to behave in ways we do not. "What I create is sort of a premise," says Daniel Rozin. "The viewers and participators close the cycle by placing themselves into it."

By sublimating their interfaces and innerworkings, he seamlessly blends engineering and aesthetics. "The direction of new designs is defined by engineers who develop new technologies because they can," maintains Rozin, "not necessarily because of their design impact." With his teaching, software development, and his confounding installations, Rozin is reversing that trend. In his Wooden Mirror (1999), 830 Scrabble®-like pieces of wood shuffle and angle themselves in the light (with the help of hidden, clacking servomotors) to re-cast whatever's in front of them into pixels of golden-lacquered pine. Mirrors #2, 3, 4 (2001) tackles the notion of digital display, in a triptych video installation whose pixels slip out of their confining x and y axes to produce a human reflection, or pull a viewer's image together from a live television feed. His Me-rror (2001) creates a play on the notion of vanity itself, with twenty mirror strips that turn as you walk past to keep an eye squarely on you.

Rozin's explorations have garnered him Israel's prestigious Rothchild Prize, a silver in I.D. Magazine's Interactive Media Design Review and, most recently, finalist status for the 2001 Muriel Cooper DMI Prize. As owner and principal of Smoothware Design, Rozin keeps drafting tools for new media's authoring community. His works represent not only evolving technology; they reflect how we see ourselves in an ever-changing world.