'Every Bar You’ve Ever Been Into': Haptics, Memory, and Motional Empathy in Paula Dawson’s Holograms

On New Year’s Eve, 1989, Australian artist Paula Dawson (b.1954) threw a party at a bar in Sydney. While this could have been, in Dawson’s words, “every bar you’ve ever been into,” it was actually fabricated within the National Acoustics Laboratory, protected from natural light, noise, and vibration––conditions necessary to create laser transmission holograms of the interior space, titled To Absent Friends. Like the “artificial dividing line” of New Year’s Eve, the holographic plate constructs a boundary between past and present, with everything behind the plate frozen in time and, in Dawson’s words, “forever unable to be touched.” We might understand the plate as a boundary between what is real and virtual, present and absent, touchable and untouchable, dynamic and still, now and then, here and elsewhere. However, rather than situating the viewer and the holographic image as occupying opposites sides of the glass, and thereby opposite poles of these dialectics, I consider how the holographic image draws the beholder into a dynamic, bodily, intersubjective relationship. I suggest we understand the viewer’s encounter as a multisensory experience, in which their sense of touch and bodily motion are activated. Drawing on Laura Marks’s “haptic visuality,” Robert Vischer’s “Einfühlung,” and Vernon Lee’s “motional empathy,” I argue that these tactile and (e)motional responses collapse the distinction between real and virtual space, creating a sense of shared space between beholder and artwork. While Dawson’s holograms are not moving images, I suggest they are “animated” images that move their viewers, both physically and emotionally.