THE HOLOGRAM PROJECT
100 hours of video documentation, several reflection holograms, transmissions holograms and a book 2005-2014
(a deep resonant voice)
Let's start right at the surface, the first appearance. Euclid imagined that the eye casts a look. The rays of this look strike a screen, the screen is the surface upon which the image will appear. It may be static or it may move, it may appear flat it may appear to have depth. If it appears to have depth it will be the kind of depth Euclid understood to come from linear perspective. Suppose the content of the image projected on the screen was of a shallow superficial nature. Would that overcome the appearance of depth created by the linear perspective?
Looking at the screen, one sees a flat surface with delineations and areas of color on it. Looking through the screen, one sees the likeness of a human face illuminated by a glow of red. One may select which perspective to adopt, to see flatness or to see depth.
Remain in black
THE PROPERTIES OF A HOLOGRAM
There are many seemingly magical properties of holograms. On the one hand, the science behind them is so groundbreaking and important it earned its creator a Nobel Prize while on the other hand holograms today are ubiquitous as security markers and cheap novelties- the quintessential pop-science. The information captured on the holographic film or plate is distributed over the entire surface in such a way that the image produced may be literally cut in half and each half of the hologram will still contain the whole image- each half cut in half- a quarter of the original, will still contain the whole image and on, we imagine, to infinity.
We find in the technology and processes of holography a way of thinking about a link between abstract art and realist art. Realism and abstraction each pushing in opposite directions toward a logical limit will eventually meet. In the hologram, we find the simultaneous existence of subject-less abstraction the “all over” ness of a mature drip painting by Jackson Pollack, such as LavenderMist: Number 1, 1950 in which the whole is echoed in the details and vice-versa, and the photo-realistic self-portraits of Chuck Close (actually reflection holograms) in which the coherent whole exists infinitely as itself in every tiny piece of the surface.
Dichotomies of the One and the Many, part and whole are neatly illustrated in the hologram without losing any of their mystery.
In this project, my collaborator and I set out to make a hologram in order to see for ourselves the seemingly magical properties it possesses. In linear sequence, we started from scratch with no knowledge at all of the theory or practice of holography and worked our way through to the production of a reasonably clear hologram, but in presentation, we break the sequence down into chunks that can be shown on multiple screens to show it in a more simultaneous fashion as all happening at once. This work is both spatially and temporally fractured in order to make it read as much as a pattern of images as it does as discreet documentary clips of the action. It is simultaneously realist and abstract similar to the way that its subject is. By echoing the structure of the holographic experience, albeit clumsily, in the structure of the movie we attempt to start into motion a film that is what it shows what it is in a loop.
