Look out of your window. Now imagine that you could push a button and cause the glass to memorise all of the light which is passing through it - every last detail. Take the glass out of the window frame and carry it into another room. Hang it on a wall and then push the ‘replay’ button. The glass sheet ‘replays’ its memory and all of the light which was originally passing through it emerges into the room. You see the original view from your window - every last detail again: the light reflecting and refracting from objects, the objects themselves, their shadows, the volume surrounding them. Move your head and you can look around the scene. It is three-dimensional, it is all there. Push the ‘off’ button, the window goes dark and you can see the wall behind. This is not science-fiction, but the reality of holography (almost).

This analogy of a window with a memory captures many of the properties of holography. There are no windows with ‘record’ and ‘replay’ buttons but the principles exists. It is possible, using holography, to record light as well as the volume it makes visible, then ‘replay’ it in such visual high-fidelity that what was once there, during the recording process, can be seen again in three-dimensions. It is hardly surprising that the moment artists heard about holograms they wanted to use the medium.

Today, over 50 years since its invention, holography is a multi-million Dollar industry used in research, advertising, architecture and publishing. Around the world artists have worked with pioneering scientists and engineers (who invented and expanded the technology), to learn how they could use this medium. Many of these artists have become pioneers themselves and found a platform to express their ideas or comment on the world they see around them. The medium can be truly expressive, not simply a high-fidelity documentary process.

Holography shares many of the aesthetic and expressive qualities of glass. The two media have combined, in varying degrees, to produce some stunning and provocative works of art.

Venezuelan Ruben Nuñez is one of the early pioneering artists to have combined both media. In Paris, during the 1950’s, his work was kinetic. During this time he had contact with Victor Vasarely, Joan Miró and Alexander Calder and became increasingly interested in colour vibration and movement. A few years later he was working with glass, capturing bubbles in his cast glass sculptures which reflected and refracted the light passing through it. As a craftsman he could control the form of the glass he was making, but not the colour and reflectivity of the light which brought these sculptures to life. Each different environment the sculptures were placed in produced a different photonic effect. Holography offered a solution and by the late 1970’s he made his first holograms. These 3-D ‘memories’ of his glass sculptures were able to ‘capture’ and ‘store’ the light which shone through glass bubbles and chipped surfaces. Each time the holograms were displayed, they showed again the quality Nuñenz wanted his audience to experience. Holokinetics was born, his term for kinetic art through holography. His 1978 solo exhibition at the Museum of Holography, New York, presented his alchemy to a surprised audience, more familiar with the clever 3-D gimmick of ‘objects’ floating in space, rather than the subtle colours and ephemeral forms he was so passionate about. This continues to happen. Audiences have a very strong view of what holography should be, which is often very different from some of the more creative pieces which artists produce. A book about Nuñez will be published in the next few weeks by “Editorial Arte” in Venezuela and will finally give an international audience the chance to see just how important his work has been to the development of holography as a creative medium.

Nuñez used holography to capture the photonic effects of his sculptures, but American artist August Muth has, for the past 10 years, been perfecting his ability to incorporate holographic images within crystal glass pieces. His sculptures are made up of extruded glass which is ground and polished into the desired form. Light-sensitive holographic emulsion is then coated onto the surfaces and holographic images are recorded there.

Some pieces include several layers of glass and holographic emulsion which are laminated together to give the sculptures a combined real and holographic depth, not achievable in other media. “Equilibrium” produced in 1998, allows abstract ‘clouds’ of colour to be combined with hard-edge hand-written letters. Viewed from a different angle, an entirely different combination of colours and objects become visible, suspended in the glass monolith. This is not holographic recording for its own sake, but an attempt to create a multi level space which shifts in and out of view, as an observer moves round the work. Muth uses a dichromate gelatin on which to record his holographic images and is one of the few artists to have mastered this process. The results are a bright and highly visible image which can also appear transparent when not viewed directly. “Cosmos” gives some idea as to how the composition does not have to de confined to the main sculptural area and can extend out into the base which supports the work. Many artists struggle with the presentation of their holograms, should they be framed, like pictures, and hung on a wall, or suspended on wires in dark rooms? Here the works become sculptural. The glass supports and displays the holographic images and the holography supports the sculptural. They are there to be explored. Take any one of the elements away and the work fails. His work is a true and intelligent combination of craft, technology and personal aesthetics.

Similar in construction, but dealing with a very different aesthetic is the work of American artist Ana MacArthur who combines objects, light and holography in specially built installations. She acknowledges the important support she has received from August Muth whose glass-forming skills have been of great assistance in her own work. This can be seen in “Telltale Blackbody”, produced last year, which presents a carefully formed crystal object held in cast bronze hands. The Crystal is made up of layers containing holographic images on glass which have been laminated and then ground to form the finished sphere. Most holograms are illuminated with a fixed spotlight, mounted on the ceiling, or by direct sunlight. Here, fibre-optics, mounted into the black slate box, on which the piece is mounted, deliver light to exactly the right spots within the crystal and illuminate the holograms there. This ‘eye’ with its rods and cones, represented by bubbles in the crystal, is so well conceived and constructed that the technology becomes transparent.

Moving up in scale is “Tenuous Seed to Riparain Fertility”, which was produced specifically for a themed exhibition in 1997, dealing with the environmental issues of the Rio Grande. All those who criticise holography as a mindless gimmick should experience this piece. Thirty-six glass tubes make up the ‘leaf’ element of the installation which hangs from a steel support. In each tube is a hologram made from the bark of the Cottonwood tree. Water from the pool below is pumped to the top of the ‘leaf’ and allowed to trickle over the surface, where it becomes noticeable as it drips back down into the pool - a glass topographical map of a section of the Rio Grande. Man has changed the Rio Grande’s ecosystem and threatened the survival of the Cottonwood tree. Here the complex technologies of glass-forming and holographic imaging give the viewer an opportunity to concentrate on some of these issues and certainly not on the technology which enabled it.

MacArthur's installation is not the first to combine holography, glass and water. American artist Sally Weber produced a holographic water fountain which combined these elements in “Focalpoint”, an elegant, yet understated sculpture. Purpose-made holograms, designed, not to capture and replay a particular image, but to diffract light into overlapping spectra, were laminated onto a large glass sheet. As sunlight shines through the piece, three individual spectra are focused on the floor and migrate across the room in response to the movement of the sun. What is elegant about this piece is that the sunlight first shines through the water-filled tubes, which make up the back of the piece, then through the holograms and finally through water again, which runs down the front glass surface of the piece. The result is ‘liquid light’ seen in the sculpture and again as it manipulates the spectral images which fall onto the floor.

A recent commission for Weber allowed her to install a specially produced hologram in the skylight rondel window of a German Museum. “Signature of the Source”, at the Karl Ernst Osthaus Museum in Hagen, produces three-dimensional, twisting jets of light which ‘hover’ five feet above and below the window surface. Many glass artists must have wished that their windows could truly liberate the light which shines through them. Here, using the technology of holography and a sensitivity to the process of imposing something new on a building with strong character, Weber has done just that. It is perhaps for this reason that she has been so successful in producing large-scale pieces designed to be installed within a particular architectural environment. Her most recent, non-holographic work “Matrix”, for the Foster Library in Centura, California, incorporates digital images laminated into a large window construction. This work will be featured in a later ‘Artist’s Portrait’ section of This Side Up.

Windows are an obvious area for the incorporation of holographic imagery and British artist Jean Bailey began her exploration of the medium with the express intention of using it to produce holographic windows. Familiar with glass and the engineering needed to produce stained glass windows, she embarked on a Masters Degree at the Royal College of Art in London, which, during the 1980’s, had an extensive and dynamic holography facility. It was there that she expanded her ideas, recording specially produced holograms for incorporation into sand-blasted and etched glass panels. “Light In Flight”, a maquette for a glass screen, incorporates the holographically produced spectral colouring, which changes depending on how it is viewed or from which direction the light shines through it, with sand-blasted and acid-etched float glass. The patterning comes directly from marking the glass, but in “City Plaza 2” all the graphic detail is generated by the hologram itself. These two examples show how some of the more traditional, and well explored glass techniques, can be combined with the intensity and shifting colours of holography. Incorporating the graphic element directly into the holograms offers artists an opportunity to ‘draw’ directly in space. The advantage this has over blasting or etching is that the colours, which define the lines, will change depending on how much light is falling on them. Bright sunlight generates intense rainbow colours but an overcast sky will result in muted, more pastel hues. Bailey is about to embark on a PhD at the University of Wales, Swansea, so that she can carry her research in this area further.

Jo Fairfax, another British artist, has been exploring the incorporation of holograms into windows and glass architectural surfaces for some time. A sculptor with a keen interest in public art and architecture, he has produced installations where the holograms, although small, are an important element in the final work.

One of his recent pieces was produced for the Ceramic Centre at Nottinghamshire’s Rufford Country Park, in the UK. The deep and acid etched toughened glass panels contain holograms (the top corner rectangles), small printed panels and poetry etched into the surface. Designed as architectural space dividers, they not only have a monolithic impact in the space, but allow close, and somewhat private, exploration. Visitors can read the words, written by his father, poet John Fairfax, or look into the small segments of volume contained within each holographic rectangle.

But not all artists have continued their exploration of holography. Steve Weinstock, an American artist, made a name for himself in the late 80’s and early 90’s for his brightly coloured, often graphic based, holograms. He adapted an existing holographic process and simplified it to a point where he could produce intense colour-mixing and dimensional ‘graphic’ shadows. Solid objects and drawings on glass or plastic would be placed into the holographic ‘volume’ and recorded to produce a visual ‘soup’ of light and colour. Not surprisingly, he began to incorporate the transmissive and refractive qualities of glass as objects for his recordings. The glass became more prevalent so that slumped glass objects would not only appear within the holograms, but become an object in which the holograms could be displayed as seen in “Bronze in Glass”. The glass eventually became more prevalent than the holograms to a point were he began concentrating on glass design and production. He now runs a design and manufacturing company producing some of the most exciting utilitarian objects in the field. In “Alchemy Wall” a mixture of ground materials are fused between 2 pieces of half-inch glass. This is slumped to produce the bowl shape and the edges are then ground and polished, giving a clear edge through which the interior organic patterns and colours can be seen. An effect, not dissimilar to some of Weinstock’s earlier holograms. It might be stretching the comparison a little to state that these glass wash-basins, designed by himself and his business partner, capture some of the holographic effervescence and richness found in Weinstock’s earlier holographic work, but it does bring us full circle.

Ruben Nuñez’s glass sculptures propelled him into the search for a medium which would ‘capture’ the photonic essence of his work. His holograms do that. Weinstock has moved out of holography and taken some of his sensitivity and love of light into industrial and domestic design work. Artists will continue to search and explore the potential of holography and the results of their journey will be seen in galleries, museums, in public spaces and within our design and architecture. One day we really will have windows with memories and the most exciting ones will be influenced by artists.

See also: "Building with Light: Holography, glass and architecture".

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Published in This Side Up, No.,10, Summer 2000, pp15-18. ISSN 1389 1707.

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