Editorial: Digital and Holography merge for new applications

September 2005

The ultrafast Mobile camera system of Caesar Research Centre in Bonn is combining computer topography and pulsed laser to create model of faces as documentation for surgery. A similar way the lenticular system of Rob Munday is producing an auto-stereoscopic ‘glasses free’ LCDmonitor technology using holographic stereographic sequences which can be digitized to produce many different types of holograms and three-dimensional images. Large format reflection hologram can also be done with a fully digitised system.

As I saw in the last Photonics conference in San Jose , we should expect other new systems coming up soon. If we analyse these present realisations we can notice that they all result from the combination or superposition of several existing techniques which prove, if necessary, that interdisciplinary work is constructive. Now all these techniques still use the digital system. Digital computer can distinguish between just two values, 0 and 1, which limits considerably the quantity of choice. This is also why we can so often hear that holograms generated by computer are not true holograms.

Who ever saw “true” hologram, felt that there is some kind of truth in it which shake our mind and believe. But what is a “true” hologram? It is the recording of object in a continuum, that is to say, the opposite of the discontinuous off and on of the digital system. If you take a pixel or a digital dot the information ends. If you take a dot of a hologram you have still dimensionality of information because it is recorded in a time space relationship. This is why Shamans of North America says that when the world becomes digital, our life time comes to end too. We disconnect ourselves from further dimensionality, a bit like the young people addicted to virtual reality. They search other dimensions in a finish space, so they are trapped in a maze. A hologram is not a miraculous panacea; it is just an indicator of our perceptive limit, showing the deformation of reality. Doing a hologram is like having one plate deformed by recording data which the light reproduces creating forms/objects, as it happens with our cortex.

Human being is full of resources as long as we live in a continuum, because information, techniques, knowledge, artistic visions are all available, we slowly learn to superpose, add these information instead of selecting or rejecting some, creating always more. Presently techniques and art merge to go further. The new work of Dietmar Ohlmann about the dot of the micro hologram and now his art research for drawing in space is all about finding physical solution to communicate with the multi-dimensions surrounding us. Scientists are already working on the Quantum computer. While traditional computers encode information into bits using binary numbers, either a 0 or 1, and can only do calculations on one set of numbers at once, quantum computers encode information as a series of quantum-mechanical states such as spin directions of electrons or polarization. So we will have quantity of possible choices.

When we see how difficult it is for so many people to read and write in Internet, a digital medium reproducing a holographic model, we can really ask us who will be able to organise those upcoming multiple choices provided through the quantum computer. The answer is in training the mind. It has been proved than the 2% difference between the brain of human and the brain of the monkey reside in the training. So if we want to be able to communicate and use the quantum techniques, we also need to train our mind in this way now. artBridge already proposed training for children and adults in the Holographic Thinking for Creative Intelligence.

The artBridge training does not only consider the technical aspect of holography but also the perceptive experience it provides with its scientific, cultural and spiritual implications. The program of the training is supported by the artworks of the holographic collection and the several kinds of holographic laboratories of artBridge. Totally mobile, the course can be given in English, French and German and it is adapted to the specific public it is addressed to. It is conducted by Dietmar Ohlmann a well known German artist, trained at the Royal College of Art, in London , and my self, sociologist and former curator of the Museum of Holography in Washington , DC . In England some courses on holographic techniques have been also newly organised indicating that we reach a new step in the history and development of holography.