The Gesture of Holography
Wednesday, February 12, 2020: 3:00 PM
Wilford C (Hilton Chicago)
With its first exhibit in 1976, the Museum of Holography in New York City published an
essay inside the program titled “Enter Holography (An Announcement and an Invitation).” Written by the Museum’s formative director, Rosemary Jackson, the text trumpets holography not only as a novel artistic medium but as an emerging revolutionary mode of human communication. This broader claim of revolution guided future discourse in and around the Museum as participants attempted to validate art holograms both by situating them along the trajectory of Western art history and by communicating their potential for entirely new mediated expressions and experiences.
This presentation draws from archived Museum documents to analyze the discourses of revolution among artists and organizers within the Museum as well as external media and
criticism. I extract from these texts descriptions of actual experiences with holograms in
order to isolate what about those experiences was or seemed challenging to artists and
spectators. Once it was determined that holography announced a radically different viewing experience — namely, the free movement of the spectator — the Museum invited spectators into that experience by creating viewing instructions and diagrams instructing how to look at and see holograms — which paradoxically limited and controlled the spectator’s newly claimed freedom of movement. I evaluate these practices through Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s reclamation of the body’s role in the experience of phenomena and Vilém Flusser’s phenomenology of gestures, as well as his theory of the “technical image” as symbolic of a revolutionary and still-emerging era in communication.
essay inside the program titled “Enter Holography (An Announcement and an Invitation).” Written by the Museum’s formative director, Rosemary Jackson, the text trumpets holography not only as a novel artistic medium but as an emerging revolutionary mode of human communication. This broader claim of revolution guided future discourse in and around the Museum as participants attempted to validate art holograms both by situating them along the trajectory of Western art history and by communicating their potential for entirely new mediated expressions and experiences.
This presentation draws from archived Museum documents to analyze the discourses of revolution among artists and organizers within the Museum as well as external media and
criticism. I extract from these texts descriptions of actual experiences with holograms in
order to isolate what about those experiences was or seemed challenging to artists and
spectators. Once it was determined that holography announced a radically different viewing experience — namely, the free movement of the spectator — the Museum invited spectators into that experience by creating viewing instructions and diagrams instructing how to look at and see holograms — which paradoxically limited and controlled the spectator’s newly claimed freedom of movement. I evaluate these practices through Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s reclamation of the body’s role in the experience of phenomena and Vilém Flusser’s phenomenology of gestures, as well as his theory of the “technical image” as symbolic of a revolutionary and still-emerging era in communication.