I've been working at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, which is responsible for flying
the unmanned space probes past the planets. The work I do here primarily involves creating
animations of what it would be like to ride along with the spacecraft as it goes by the
planets. I go about it in a fairly methodical way, simulating light reflecting off of surfaces
and the geometry of objects in space for perspective and so forth. This is what artists around
the Renaissance were concerned a lot with, being able to do more intuitively, but there's
a lot of art involved just in the programming itself. I call myself a visual music maker,
and that means that I take music, listen to it, and transpose it into its visual equivalence.
The technique of computer animation, the technique of electronic animation, the techniques of
videography, those are tools just like paintbrushes are to an artist who paints on a canvas or
chisels with a chisel and a hammer for making sculpt, only I do it with cathode ray tubes
and photons and electronic imagery. My name is Lowry Burgess, and I'm an artist, or at
least I'm called that by many people, although much of my work disappears, it's dissolved
and invisible, it's exploded, and in fact that's very consistent with much of the drift
of art since the Second World War, that it places greater and greater demands upon imagination,
upon the empathy, upon capacities that really are not tangibly or physically present. Part
of that general extension also has been the rapid increase of the use of high technologies
and science by artists in their work. The tools and assembly of materials and energies
which expand the possibilities that the artist has in the studio, most conspicuous of these
new tools is the laser, the computer, and holography. All of these give the artist the
potential to move into a new studio, a new kind of laboratory. This film is now going
to take you to several of these new studios. We'll begin with the New York Institute of
Technology, which has experimented with and created some of the most impressive of the
new computer art pieces, and which created the new Nova opening you have been seeing
this year. New York Institute of Technology has, for the past five years, been trying
to apply digital computer technology to the problems of animation. This piece, animated
by Paul Hekbert, attempts to overcome some of the limitations of the human face.
This piece, animated by Paul Hekbert, attempts to overcome some of the limitations of the
human face. Of course, to make images like this requires millions of dollars worth of
computer equipment, but it also requires some very imaginative people. And it's this human
imagination that's really the focus of the thing. In the same way that human calculation
was hastened first by writing instruments, then by the slide rule, then by adding machines,
and finally by computers, computers are now being used to extend the human visual imagination,
What fascinates me about computer graphics is that while I've always been interested
in the visual arts, with a background in mathematics and engineering, until recently I haven't
been able to express those interests. Computer animation gives me the most direct route from
conceptualization to visualization. It lets me bypass the use of my hands in traditional
artist materials. I'd like to show you some of the techniques that I've used in a recent
production for the new opening for the Nova Show. One of the first jobs we had was to
produce the image of the galaxy, which you see up here. The first step in that process
was to find an image of the galaxy. We use this one here. The next step in the process
is to put that image in a form that the computer can understand. The first stage of this process
is to convert the photograph into an analog signal. To do this, we use a standard television
camera that scans the photograph from left to right, top to bottom. It converts the information
into an electronic signal which is analogous to the brightness at each point that it scans,
hence the term analog. This signal is sent downstairs to a special computer that measures
the signal 10 million times a second. These measurements are then converted into numbers
or digits which are stored in the computer's memory. Once the photograph is in this form,
the computer can understand it and manipulate it. This board is full of microchips. Each
chip contains 16,000 switches. It is the process of turning these switches on and off that
all computers have in common. Each switch represents a single bit or digit, and hence
the process is referred to as a digital process. This particular device is a frame buffer.
It's a device that makes a computer graphics facility different from other computer facilities.
At one end, the frame buffer looks to the computer as a standard computer memory, but
at the other end, it looks to a video monitor or a tape recorder as a video signal. It allows
us to translate the mathematical representation of a picture into a visual one.
What we're looking at here are individual pixels blown way up. When we go to videotape,
they're actually much smaller as they're a quarter of a million on the screen at any
given time. The representation we have of the galaxy now is two-dimensional. That is
flat just like the photograph we started out with. The effect we wanted in the opening
though was a three-dimensional trip through the galaxy. To do that, we had to describe
to the computer the position, the size, and the brightness of 40,000 stars.
To accomplish that, I wrote a program that looked at each and every pixel in the photograph.
If it saw a bright pixel, that indicated that the photograph was bright and there were a
lot of stars in the original galaxy. For that section of the galaxy, we made a lot of stars,
we made them bright, and we spread them apart. If the pixel was dim, we made fewer stars,
made them dimmer, and clumped them closer together. Once we have the three-dimensional
description, we can ask the computer to draw the galaxy from any position in space. And
if we change that position smoothly from frame to frame, we've created a piece of animation.
Another computer programmer at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Jim Blinn, has done some amazing
simulations of the Voyager flybys of Jupiter and Saturn.
Each frame of this movie was made by a computer. In order for a computer to make pictures,
it has to divide the picture up into a lot of little spots. As we zoom in on the picture,
you can see each spot show up its little box. There's 480 boxes up and down and 512 going
across. Now, for places where we've been, we can get mathematical data for the shape
of the continents of the Earth or photographs of Jupiter. But for places that we haven't
been to yet, we have to paint in a hypothetical background, a hypothetical map of the surface.
And for that, we use what's called a painting program. This program simulates the painting
process except we're painting directly into the computer's display memory instead of on
real canvas. The colored spots at the bottom of the screen are the color palette. And you
can see the little white spot of light moves left and right as I move the pen left and
right and moves up and down as I move the pen up and down. The computer can keep track
of where the pen is. There's a little click switch in the tip so that when you press down
on it, it starts leaving a trail of color behind. Select different colors for the paint
brush. And you can change the size of the paint brush. Large paint brushes are good
for painting in large areas.
Now, you can play around with this thing and make all sorts of interesting pictures just
free form. The actual purpose of this thing, however, was to make some hypothetical maps
of various of the moons and planets we hadn't been to yet so we can make simulations of
what they might look like when we got there. In order to put a map on the surface of the
sphere, we have to define the map in somewhat the same way we do the picture. It's an array
of spots with a color for each latitude and longitude on the surface of the planet. And
once we have that defined, we can have the program refer to that as it's scanning out
the picture of the planet. Essentially, for each spot on the screen, it's figuring out
what latitude and longitude is visible there, looking that up on the map to get the color,
and then testing that against the light source to find out how bright to make it. And one
other way of putting texture on a surface is to simulate wrinkles and bumps, which in
the case of planets, shows mountain ranges. In order to do that, you have to describe
to the computer the altitude of the surface at each point. It's a different sort of texture.
Instead of color, it's the relief. And when you make this sort of picture, you get the
shadowing and the highlighting effects of where the mountain ranges are. Now, all these
programming tools can be used to make the pictures we've seen here, but the creation
and the processing of images can also be used to good effect for just purely artistic purposes,
which is what has been done by the artist David M.
Well, one of the really remarkable things about the programs that I use to make these
images are that you can generate shaded textured surfaces. And in particular, you can generate
them with extreme detail, as the sphere here, which started out as a very simple, smooth
shaded sphere, and now we've put a fairly textured surface onto it. But we can take
the textured sphere and we can put much more complex arrangements into it so that we can
actually compose images that aren't simply descriptions, but are actual creative compositions
in the sense of fine arts. There are a lot of textures that could be made, and maybe
we should go to a very, very simple one to get the idea really clearly, such as a grid.
So if we take this grid, we can very simply put this grid onto a surface as well, which
is reading in at the moment. So here we have a sphere again, but instead of the previous
texture, we have the grid that we just looked at. Now there's a lot of things that we can
do once we start with a texture, and so I've used this grid texture in a lot of different
compositions. And so what we'll do is now take a very different kind of picture and
see what the same basic information that the computer is dealing with does when instead
of throwing it onto a sphere, I decide to map something more along the lines of pyramids.
We can take the same texture and come up with a completely different look instead of possibilities.
You see the little white sphere that was in the previous image is here too, and so you
can get a totally different kind of look from it. So we go back to the color map we had
a minute ago, and using again the grid texture but a completely different kind of picture,
we come up with this composition. Now in this image I've gone ahead and taken this image
and by focusing in on one part of the picture, like the central portion here, I've been able
to do that and use that in yet another image. So what I've done is taken the completed picture
and used that as a texture that shows up in the spheres in this 16 part picture which is composed
of sequences that can be animated. The computer medium can duplicate many of the characteristics
that other media have. It works a lot the way painting does. It works in its three-dimensional
capabilities a lot the way sculpture does. It works in terms of animation a lot of the
way that film does, but it's none of those things. It's like painting in the same way
that painting is like sculpture. They share many similarities, but they're really not
the same thing. The computer gives you expanded capabilities in a great number of ways. As
I said already, it gives you the element of control. You really don't have that fine a
control in any other medium, but it also gives you tremendous choices. It lets you choose
from almost an infinity of colors that you can have on the screen at any given time and
it lets you manipulate those colors in many, many ways. It lets you join together many
different disciplines so that yes, you can paint in a single image that you have in the
frame buffer of the computer and then you can come in and do very sculptural things
that are dimensional and then you can come in and do things that are quite truly architectural.
I have never indulged myself in the process of digital technology as yet because I've
been working all these years, four to six years now, just getting the craft of analog,
videography and electronic animation down. I enjoy that process of analog working with
video and real time machines because I can see it and when I'm through with an editing
process after eight hours, I've made something. The process that I have to use is one that
demands upfront I record where I'm going. It's like filing a flight plan and that means
that I have to spend a lot of private time to devise the look of the landscape. I use
the word devise only because the process I have to use is called image scripting. I have
to very carefully image script and storyboard which looks something like this. This is a
book of approximately 50 or so pages of images that were created for the visualization of
the Prelude in Love Death. Each picture is part of a map that shows me where I'm going
to go and helps me decide how I'm going to do it.
Alright, let's go.
Those, not very surprising sounds, are the second piece of computer music ever produced
I wrote the little tune and I saw it through the computer with the help of
Max Matthews who started all this. I was at that time around 1960 executive
director of research communication sciences division at Bell Telephone
laboratories in Murray Hill New Jersey and Max Matthews was head of the
behavioral science department. He worked on the processing of speech and he also
was very close to psychologists and people in the general field of acoustics
and we investigated all aspects of sound and were drawn into this very peculiar
new aspect of sound, sounds generated by computers. A lot of people have been
intimidated by everything that computers do including the making of music. Indeed
that's what kept good composers away from computers for a long time and in
perhaps in part it perhaps it's what keeps people away from the music that
is produced. Another thing that keeps people away from the music is that the
people who have done the best work with computers are contemporary if not avant
garde musicians. They aren't composing in the tradition of Beethoven or even of
Berlioz or later composers. They're composing something that to them is new
using a new means to do new things and the new things are unfamiliar. They aren't
the things that people have heard and have become familiar with. John Chowning
is an incredible person. His background was entirely musical. He spent a few
weeks at Bell Laboratories, went back to Stanford, got in touch with the computer
people and somehow got a full-fledged project going. He invented a new form of
sound synthesis called FM synthesis. He has found out how to make sounds fly
around the room. He is just a man with limitless energy and limitless ideas. One
of the earliest projects that we worked on in the domain of computers and music
beginning back in 1964 was a program that allowed us to move sounds in an
illusory space based upon the fact that we have four loudspeakers and with a
rather extraordinary control over the signals that are applied to the loud
speakers via the computer technology. This is a program which represents in
two dimensions a listener space with loudspeakers at each of the corners of
the square. Presumably the listeners are within the square. The idea is to
provide a kind of freedom for the location and motion of sounds within an
illusory space which is not bounded by the walls that we normally find
ourselves within. I'll play an example in which we'll listen to a bit of a piece,
Taranis, which is about 10 years old, where this pattern occurs in the initial
moment or two and I'll point that out. This is a sound that's moving in this
rather complicated trajectory and on the screen we see various functions which
are derived, which are to control the relative amplitude between speakers,
Doppler shift, the overall loudness of the signal having to do whether it's
close to us or far away.
One of the great problems of computer music is the audience. You can scarcely
ask people to go to a concert hall to hear a tape played or a computer
performed. Will they listen to it on records? Not if it isn't on records and
although records have been printed it's essentially not on records. Will they
hear it in the films? This is my great hope. A friend of mine, Andy Moore, is now
employed by George Lucas to make wonderful new sounds which may occur in
films. Well, anything is acceptable in a film and if the computer music is good
this is its real chance with a large audience. Part of my main impetus for
being in this field is that I've combined my favorite pastimes that is
fiddling with technology and fiddling with music and this is a dream
come true. It's a chance of a lifetime, I feel, for building the kind of music
making system that we've thought about and that we've known could be built for
years and years and years. This is the first time that I know of that anyone
has gone into developing technology in the arts in this scale very seriously
for exactly the purpose of bringing the arts into the 20th century or at least
into the second half of the 20th century. The machinery that we're building here
at least in my group is tailored towards processing of audio, processing
of sound, and we're using computer-like equipment. If you'd like I can show you
some of the materials we're working with in this. This is the parts cabinet where
we store all the integrated circuits. These are the fundamental building
blocks of all modern computers. All computers these days use things, circuits
like this. These circuits perform many different functions. Some are memory
elements, some are arithmetic elements, some are logic elements, storing data, some
are used to transmit data from one place to the other. These circuits are installed
in circuit boards like this one here.
Then they're interconnected by wiring on the pins on the back of the panel here.
Once the circuits are wired together, the boards are installed in a cabinet such as
this one here. This is the one that we're using that holds eight different boards.
This particular one opens up because this is an experimental device and we
need to be able to get at the insides of it at all times. The boards are then
connected together by cables such as this one which attach to receptacles at
the edge of the boards. In addition we connect the device to things in the
outside world such as computer terminals or tape recorders or whatever via cables
also different kinds of cables but cables nonetheless. Sound is
fundamentally a vibration, a pressure wave in the air and normal music or a
normal electronic processing of music what happens is that we attempt to
encode the pressure of the air in terms of an electrical voltage. We all know
how this is done or maybe we don't know how it's done but we certainly know that
it happens all the time. We have an electrical wire that goes to your
speaker in your hi-fi system and what's going through there is a voltage that if
all is working well is proportional to the sound pressure level of the sound at
that point at the music at that point. Well what we do with the computer is
exactly the same sort of thing except we have devices again integrated circuits
called converters that measure instantaneously the voltage on a wire
and produce from that a number representing that voltage. This is done
very very rapidly 30,000 40,000 50,000 times a second. They're like snapshots
repeated snapshots each one of which is a fixed picture if you will or
measurement of the voltage at that point and when taken together in a stream they
produce the illusion or the effect of a continuous moving sound or moving
voltage which is an analog of the sound pressure wave and that's how we deal
with sound in the computer is in terms of these numbers which are snapshots or
frames of the sound pressure wave. What I'd like to show you is just an
example of some of the things the computer can do and the example I have
here is dealing with the human voice. What we'll play is a recitation of a
poem and then the computer synthesized version of that that same point. What
we've done here we haven't modified the speech in any way it's just the original
recitation and the synthesized version.
So graciously you yield, thankful for every caress for every word. Now the
synthetic. So graciously you yield, thankful for every caress for every word.
Again. So graciously you yield, thankful for every caress for every word. Synthetic.
So graciously you yield, thankful for every caress for every word. The piece
I'd like to play for you is composed of three sounds. There's a recitation of a
poem, Poem by Rodigan, recited by Charles Shear and there is a live flute. Tim
Weisberg, the flute player, was very kind to donate several minutes of music to us.
Now what I've done is I've taken these two and I've produced a third sound
which is a cross between the flute and the voice. So there's a wispy, willowy sound
that's actually mouthing the words of the poem.
And now.
We stopped at perfect days.
We stopped at perfect days. We got out of the car.
We stopped at perfect days and got out of the car.
The wind glanced at her hair. It was as simple as that.
I turned to say something.
In everything we've seen up to this point, there's one common tool which is
the computer. The computer to me is not necessarily a very new instrument.
It's very much like a cathedral organ, which we all know very well. We see the
organ master sitting at his console playing the keys and pulling the stops
and what he's really doing is interrupting the flow of air through the
chambers into the various pipes to produce a wondrous variety of sound.
Just as the organ master sits there, so we see everybody at their keyboards
essentially interrupting through the computer the flow of electrons to
produce wonderful images of light and sound. New things for our eyes and ears.
To stick with the cathedral image, there's another thing in the cathedral
which was absolutely new in its time, which was the wondrous stained glass
window, which through the purity of light and its power in the dark space had
a great capacity to excite wonderful images inside us. Likewise, we have a new
instrument, another new instrument, a laser, which has this extraordinary
purity of light which fascinates everyone who sees it, just the light itself.
So we have finally this very bright light and just as the stained glass window
was a surface on which the play of sunlight could happen, so the hologram
becomes a surface on which the laser can play.
Music
Light consists of a wide spectrum of very, very active energies, all the way from the
most active, violet, down to red, which is the least active but still very active.
Now laser light chooses a very, very tiny, thin, narrow range of light, and what's been
very hermetic about holography in the past is that it required that little, thin, narrow
laser light to be seen, and both to be made and to be seen, so that holograms could only
be seen if you had lasers.
One of the major innovations that came along was with Steve Benton at Polaroid, when he
invented a means of seeing a hologram in white light, in light that you could have in your
house or in sunlight outside, and this opened a floodgate of possibilities in holography.
This piece of glass is actually a white light hologram called Crystal Beginning, which we
originally made in 1977 as a kind of spatial test pattern, but people seemed to like looking
at it too.
You can see how the white light is broken up into a spectrum, so that as you move up
and down, the color of the image changes, and the image is also three-dimensional, so
that as you move from side to side, you see the shift between the front and the back parts
of the image.
You can also make holograms of actual objects, such as this hologram of some apples.
Now, it's actually three holograms in one, so as you move from side to side, you'll see
bites appear in those apples.
We designed white light holograms so they could be viewed with ordinary sources of light,
like a spotlight or sunlight or an electric light that you could buy in a hardware store.
All these lights are spread out over a wide spectrum of all colors.
That's why they're white light, but 10 years ago, we had to show holograms with lasers,
which have all their light concentrated into a single color.
Now, lasers are expensive and difficult to work with, but they do give some pretty impressive
images, like this hologram, which we made with Fritz Goro a few years ago.
The images can be very sharp and deep and so realistic that people actually try to reach
out for them.
White light illumination turned out to be even more practical because anybody could
set up a hologram in a museum or a gallery or their private collection.
All these holograms are printed onto a very high-resolution photographic emulsion coated
on these glass plates, but that's where the analogy to photography ends.
So let's go in the lab and I'll show you how a hologram really is recorded.
Now the hissing noise you hear is coming from some air bellows that we had to put under
this very heavy and rigid table, because although our holograms can be viewed with white light,
they all start with a laser exposure, like this one, and that means that everything has
to stand extremely still for several seconds during the exposure, and the plate's held
over here, the object is clamped down here and illuminated with a laser beam coming from
over there.
Now let's talk about the laser beams for a second.
Now the beam starts from this end of the table and comes along and is split into two and
comes back together for the exposure, as we'll see in a minute.
The beam itself is coming up through a hole in the table from the laser, which is under
here.
The laser produces a concentrated beam of purely single-frequency light, unlike an ordinary
light source that spreads out a beam of white light, which has lots of different frequencies
in it.
It's that purity that makes hologram recording possible.
Now I don't normally blow smoke on laser optics, but this should help you see where the beams
are going.
Now most of the light is going down this way, where it'll expand to illuminate the object,
the chest men in this case, but part of the light has been split off over here and is
going around and is expanding here to reflect off this mirror and go down to the plate directly
where it overlaps the light reflected from those chest men.
Now here the light is expanding, it's going over to illuminate the chest men, and the
second reference beam is coming down directly to hit the plate, and it's where the light
from the objects and the reference beam overlap that the holographic recording is made and
the information is recorded on the plate, but there's nothing on the plate that looks
anything like a chest man until you illuminate it in just the right way, and to understand
that better, I'd better draw you a couple of pictures.
Let's look at a really simplified version of what we saw on the laboratory table.
Starts out with the laser, just putting out its concentrated beam of light, and here we
put a beam splitter, which reflects most of the light down to a mirror, which is going
to put it through a lens to spread it out and aim it at the object, which are the chest
men over here.
So those waves are expanding and get reflected back in a kind of broken up form towards where
we're going to put the holographic plate with its very high resolution, slow speed emulsion.
That's not the only light that's going to expose the plate, because that would just
produce a fog plate.
We put a mirror up here and beam the rest of the light towards the plate, expand it
with another lens.
So it produces another set of waves, which we call the reference waves, which overlap
the waves from the object, and where they overlap, they produce an interference pattern.
Very fine dark and light fringes, perhaps 25,000 of them to the inch, and that's what
produces the exposure in the holographic emulsion.
It's much too fine to see with your eye, but when you expose it and process it, you have
the hologram.
Now if we take that hologram, put it back in place after processing, and re-illuminate
it with those waves that came from the laser, from the same direction and angle that the
reference beam originally was, that recording in the emulsion diffracts those waves and
reproduces exactly the waves that had been scattered from the object, so that if you
put your eye there, the lens in your eye will focus an image on your retina, and you'll
see the object just as though we're still there behind the plate reflecting that light.
That's a pretty abstract concept.
What it means is that if you put your eyes here, they focus the image, and you see an
extremely realistic three-dimensional image of that scene floating behind the hologram,
just as though we're still there as it was a couple of hours before.
If you move around, you see different perspective views.
Your two eyes see the stereo pair that you need to get a three-dimensional view.
If you come right up to the window, the hologram, you see through just that small part of it
that's in front of your eye, and you see the entire scene from that particular perspective
view.
And you can also use that small area of the hologram to project that view of the scene
in front of the hologram, as I can show you on this slide.
Now here's a hologram being illuminated by two separate laser beams from the top and
the bottom.
From the top, it's projecting the view of the scene from the top, so we see these letters,
for example, over the top of this hoop.
Down here, the laser beam is projecting the view from the bottom of the hologram, so we
look through the hoop to see the letters.
And it's this ability of a hologram to project different perspective views from different
parts of the hologram that makes it possible to make a white light transmission hologram.
To make a white light transmission hologram, we take that hologram and illuminate a narrow
horizontal strip of it with a fan beam of light so that we project images not onto a
screen but to a second holographic plate, which we record with a second reference beam
from the same laser.
And because this image contains all the right-to-left eye views, it contains all the information
we need in order to see 3D.
But that's a lot less information than what then was on the original laser hologram.
That means that we need a lot less coherent light source in order to view it.
So we can use a white light source, like sunlight or spotlight, and that makes it a lot easier
to see these holograms.
My feelings about 3D are very intense and personal, and it's something that once you've
gotten bit by it, I think you're stuck with it for the rest of your life, there's a 150-year
history of people who have felt that way, and they've done a lot of good work, which
we're all building up from.
I'm Harriet Cousden Silver.
I'm an artist based at the Center for Advanced Visual Studies at the Massachusetts Institute
of Technology.
I've been there now since 1976.
I like to say I'm an artist first and a holographer second because I feel that if I weren't working
with holography, I would be working with some other art medium.
I've worked with various holographic systems.
This is one of my white light transmission holograms.
It's called Equivocal Forks II.
Let's look at it.
You can see this hologram as you can most holography from side to side.
There are particular angles of view, and you can change your angles, see different versions
of the imagery, the forks come in and out for you.
Also, you can see this forks plate from way back down the road.
As you walk into it, it changes, it will change color as you change your angle of view moving
into it.
That's up and down, and as you walk directly into the light, the light will start to swim
around your head, so you feel enveloped by the hologram.
Before the white light equivocal forks, I did a series of laser transmission equivocal
forks, which is usually the way you work toward a master that will make the white light.
Now this is something that I would like to show to you.
I particularly like the laser.
Let me turn the laser on.
The laser has an element of fantasy, of mystery, elements that white light don't give one.
Also it adds some definition to the imagery, voila, equivocal forked laser version.
Look at what I have here.
I'm Lowry Burgess, and I'm a professor at the Mass College of Art.
What are you doing over there?
The class that's assembled here is a group of graduate students from the Master of Fine
Arts program.
They are all participating in a group called Graduate Seminar, in which we discuss issues
which are common to all of us in our work.
Now in recent times, the last 150 years, we as a culture have essentially evolved a very
powerful elaborate technology that maybe is more extensive than most other cultures, but
certainly reaches out.
Reason why I brought all these things here today was to show you that my perception of
technology now is that it's beginning to go into a phase where it comes to wrap around
our body to create a new kind of garment.
We see plenty of people jogging around with these things on.
This allows us to listen to great distances if we wanted to, the edge of the universe.
We see people out watching birds like so in the morning.
We see also this rather elaborate new piece of jewelry, the camera, which hangs around
everybody's neck.
All these things, including the computer wristwatch and the elaborate arrays of things that people
wear electronically, combine to make a new fabric, a new garment around us.
To me, this is a new dimension of technology.
It's coming to be much more like clothing and much closer to our skin.
Do you find that these new technologies have almost a kind of magic to them, almost a magical
quality?
Tremendous magic.
You know, we can place our eyeballs on the rings of Saturn.
We can put our ears out on the edge of the universe.
We can make our hands reach down into the atomic structure or the DNA structure.
So this wonderful magic that appears is staggering.
The question is, what ends are we going to put those powers to?
And are they going to serve life-fulfilling goals in some way?
For some people, my artwork is difficult.
I create objects which I bury or send into space or sink in the ocean.
So much of what I have done cannot be seen.
I can only describe it.
But what I hope is that by telling people about it, I will have etched a vision of it
in their imaginations.
For 13 years, I've been involved in one single work called The Quiet Axis, which involves
a wide array of technologies in a very maybe difficult but strange and I think wonderful
work.
It stems from a vision I had in 1968 of an inclined lake and air in a place called Bamiyan
in Afghanistan, high up in the Hindu Kush.
The origin of the vision of the inclined lake was from my deep despair over the events in
Southeast Asia during the Vietnam War.
And what indeed was it that I could do that might begin to lay a basis for some other
understanding?
And it was one particular time when I was most disturbed and I walked out on my porch
one evening and asking, what is it that I can do?
And looked off toward the sun in the evening and saw a lake of water sloping in air as
clearly as could be with water lilies blooming on its surface.
And the problem was, how can you make water slope in air?
And how can you make a work that has the ethereal quality of a vision?
And it was the ethereality and the mirage-like quality of holography that could give me an
appropriate embodiment for the vision and give me the means to go actually do the work.
So what I made were a series of 12 plates of holograms of water lilies and stars.
And the water lilies were in very deep darkness.
And each water lily was blooming at a different angle, a different sense of width of bloom.
And above the water lilies was a plate of the stars above the earth.
And beneath the water lily was a plate of the stars beneath the earth, one plate for
each month.
So it's as if you took the stars from this side of the earth, the stars from this side
of the earth, and compressed them together around the image of the water lily to make
a plate that would be compressed such that almost the earth had vanished.
And to take these plates then up to the high valley and to bury them along the mile and
a half axis.
Damian is high up in the Hindukush region of Afghanistan.
I came here with my family to complete my work, and I made a film document of it.
I came to bury my holograms in the desert in a pattern which would form an imaginary
lake.
I wanted to create an image in the mind of a hovering lake, poised in air over the sand.
You know what a hologram looks like now.
I want you to be able just to imagine this one, to make it come into your own mind.
For everyone in the hologram, the image will be different and personal.
As people find out about different fragments of my work through films or lectures, what
I hope is that they will be able to create for themselves an image to resonate in mind.
The new technologies are leading us into more illusionary spaces.
Holograms hover in space behind a dim photographic plate.
Computers give us music or pictures which are really but numbers stored electronically
in the computer's memory.
All these instruments create images which are remembered in our mind when they disappear
in the world around us.
Holograms hover in space behind a dim photographic plate.
Computers give us music or pictures which are really but numbers stored electronically
in the computer's memory.
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