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SCIENCE/FICTION: on Holography and Light.
I
am most interested in art which examines
and experiments with the mind's organization of the information
it receives from the senses: "real" reality filtered
through the mind's reality. With vision, the brain
relies on the presence or absence of clues provided by the
eyes, such as object overlap: the result determines our
understanding, our "making sense." Light
can define and redefine these clues, both revealing physical
space and manifesting its own luminous boundaries, corridors
and pathways. Experiments in
light both appeal to humans' mothlike attraction to it and
provide realisations of and incredulity with the deceptions
our minds create.
As sculpture made entirely of light, holography confronts
human vision at the perceptual level to an intriguing, sometimes
baffling extent. To understand the methods behind the
image provides invaluable insight for appreciating the capability
of light to be rerouted and tricked, cut up and turned inside
out, encoded and decoded, perceived by our own quirky detectors
- our eyes, and then further manipulated by our brains.
The desire to understand and disseminate such phenomena
is the reason I tirelessly scrawl explanatory diagrams of
laser labs and interference on napkins and receipts.
The End of Illusions
The public is exposed to only a tiny glimpse of holography,
much less how it is made. It has been used and abused in
advertising gimmicks, and has captured imaginations in sci-fi
movies, leading people to believe that (or wish that) a
hologram can walk and talk. While dreams
of a thinking and independent massless body-double intrigue
our senses, the actual, physical hologram is as evocative
as the fictitious hologram. Instead of using houdini-esque
special effects, it relies on the wavelike behavior of light
in itself. [right - 1966 diagrams]
And so, even as its development was linked to scientific
innovation and the inventor a Nobel Prize awardee in physics,
the overpowering mythology of holography is the fascinating
tale of a retro vision of the perfectly simulated 3D future
- ethereal and transparent holographic clones mingling with
tangible, heavy humans.
With such established legacies formed from its optimistic
heyday following the invention of the laser in the 60's,
2006 is an interesting time to present people with holograms
once more. I do not strive to deny or ignore this fantastical
legacy to which it is intrinsically attached. A historical
look at "The Future" will point time and time
again to ideas if simulated reality, so holography is a
perfect fit: a monochromatically-lit "person,"
not quite alive or dead, but suspended in time to the detail
of their fingernails and eyelashes: a time capsule of a
being who will not age, but hover in space indefinitely.
I simply intend to understand and manipulate this already
"beautiful" and strange phenomenon: and the optical
properties that make this possible - the intersection of
the physical truth underneath the beauty, and the strange
grip of our senses to be attracted to it.
Thus in reality, we have the laser viewable"holographer's
hologram," or a holographic image projected on a surface,
or face seen pseudoscopically - in full dimensions but backwards
and inside out. We also have holograms of light in itself,
reflected internally and replayed through interference (see
Untitled Projects and Auroreal). In my projects I
choose to provoke the exploratory and interactive process
of looking. Where holograms used in advertising usually
have a catchy, "I get it" type of immediacy, I
would like to present a different aspect which calls for
a more thorough, process-oriented examination. A subversion
of the typical image/observer relationship, your gaze will
affect its motion and attitude in surprising ways, and just
might make you want to reach out and connect with the transparent
image.
Mad-Science
Unless they have a physics background, most people I've
met assume my work was made by a computer and are amazed
when i show them an image of a lab table boasting its maze
of laser-beams winding their way through an obstacle course
of lenses, mirrors, microscope objectives and pinholes (not
to mention gobs of hot-glue). While 3D computer programs
such as Maya and 3D Studio Max create 2D images that convincingly
depict 3D scenes using computational means, traditional
holograms reconstruct the entire dimensional wavefront and
make three dimensional images by optical/photonic means:
lasers, interference patterns and diffraction. [right]
Luminous Surgery
A hologram is analagous to the way we
visually perceive the world. In order for you to see me,
there must be some available light to bounce off my face
and into your eyes, so you are seeing a light-map of my
face. As you change your own angle, looking up,
down, and around me, a slightly different sliver of this
whole light-map (the wavefront) is intercepted
by your eyes and you see a new perspective. This
is exactly what holography plays upon. A self portrait is
the laser's recording on a trasparent film of the space
I occupied: a freezing of time and space for an instance,
the lightwaves halted and trapped in a luminous web of interference
patterns on light-sensitive film, to be stored for later
retreival.
Object or Non-Object?
A holographic
image then, is the "object" floating in the air
which lacks the same atomic structure and physical mass
as the object which recorded it, but is the exact replica
of the evidence that the object was there in the first place.
This means that light, with all its connotations as an ephemeral,
suggestive, non-object "essence", is in fact
the medium that this object is made out of.
This "object" is not free-standing: it is intrinsically
married to the film which encodes it in a 20 nanosecond
blast of pulsed laser light [right], and rests transparent
until being replayed by the precise recording angle. Just
as one needs an electromagnet to properly playback a cassette
tape's information, a hologram requires the proper means
to decode its secrets as well.
Yes It's A Thing!
Therefore, a hologram is not just an "illusion"
of the real thing; it isn't just an illustration of it either
-- it is a reconstruction, a map of light removed
from me and stored away, to be materialized and gazed upon
at a later time. A human's optical / cognitive system is
the necessary completion to the piece. Any documentation
only hints at the goings-on of two human retinas in combination
with the brain.
Our Broken Machines
Most things
are not readily available to normal human perception - the
obvious example is light as the limited portion of the electromagnetic
spectrum that humans are able to detect without instruments.
We are not usually aware of where information
is located; in the example of vision, some of what we see
is at the object and some is only in our eye-brains (ex.
afterimages) which are not perfect detectors. Many
people do not consider this since it all looks the same
to us, but art truly becomes interesting when it can reveal
the mechanism of our own vision to us and surprise us into
paying attention.
Light and color
relate so many fields, from issues of particles, wavelengths,
and the electromagnetic spectrum, to more psychological
moods and social associations. My holographic experiments
have required me to investigate and understand optical phenomena
such as depth perception, real versus virtual images, diffraction,
and coherent (ie pure) versus incoherent light. The
multiple disciplines that this medium crosses provides numerous
models of viewing "reality" - physics and poetics
intersect. Beauty as not merely a pleasure rush, but an
underlying appreciation of truth and structure, answers
that lead to more questions: an interplay of the physical
world and its patterns and explanations, with the nonsensical
contents of dreams and mythologies.
* thanks to ed wesly for the quality archives!
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invisible
viewing-window
[click
imgs to enlarge]
it must be a laser
[click
imgs for more]
laser
interference
pulse
ruby laser controller
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