Thank you. I want to start by saying that for me gatherings like this are really important. And we were just discussing last night, Melissa Crenshaw and I, that this is essentially our tribe.

And that to be in this community of people is usually, have been some of the peak times of our lives in terms of this level of interaction and excitement that it generates. And so I'm very grateful that the museum is taking this course and is interested in pursuing it and developing it further.

For myself, I've been on this course of digital and analog holography for a long time. And I began at New York Institute of Technology where I was working in the Center for Optics, Lasers and Holography, when the computer graphics lab was in its heyday.

And we began building an experimental system for creating digital holograms at that time, which was around 83, 84. And as I progressed, I had a lot of access at that time at New York Tech to high-end graphics, because that was the hotbed of computer graphics at that time.

And particularly with the 3D animation systems that they were running on huge VAX systems at that time. So I took that with me when I left and progressed in my own work in the digital realm, which was mostly in 2D. So I've been moving 2D digital and analog holography and now 3D digital, mixing and matching all these aspects.

So by the early 90s, I had an opportunity to work with Ken Haynes, who had developed a new system after he left American Banknote to make computer-generated holograms, or to take digital content and make holograms from that.

And I worked as a 3D animator for them for a couple of years, but at that time it was making mass-produced holograms for embossing. So these were all commercial images. I think I got to make one of my own personal images during that time. But it gave me an understanding of the medium and what its potential was.

Since then, Simian, Ken's company, folded. And although that was a very high-end system for its time, there was really nothing that filled the gap for a period of time after that until we began to see work coming from Zebra.

And then later from some of the other companies. So I'm going to talk today about what that transition means for fine artists. Because we're at the cusp of what I feel is a really important and pivotal time, where there are many artists out there that have experience with 3D animation.

And there's a huge body of art, well, there's a body of artists who have experience with holography much experience with holography, but we have to find ways to merge the two. So first of all, to just define a little bit of my terms here, analog holography,

I'm largely referring to as holography that's been created using continuous wave laser in the traditional way of making reflecting light off an object with a reference beam

and forming wave fronts, which we record onto film. And then historically, we would next move into pulse holography, which in many ways was our analog to digital photography, or analog to photography with flash. So now we could stop motion. Then we were also seeing work being produced through the holographic stereogram,

which has had many different names. I'm using that term, which was a way of taking movie sequences and imaging those into little strip holograms on cylindrical film initially, in the work of Lloyd Cross, particularly.

And now we're moving into more advanced systems that take digital data or digital data from many different sources and can image it into a holographic image. I'm using digital in that context. There are other people talking about digital holography when they are referring to creating holograms from generating the wave fronts in the computer.

That's a very advanced technology that doesn't really lend itself to artists. At this point in time, in the broad spectrum that I'm talking about, I'm really looking at it from the practical aspects of how artists can gain access to this technology and start to really work with it,

because we have that technology now. So in terms of this evolving technology, we really began with multiplex with the work of Lloyd Cross, and that also got termed as the holographic stereogram.

So essentially, we're looking at a series of stereo pairs of images where we've sacrificed the vertical parallax, and they were being imaged as rainbow holograms at that time. At that time, too, there were a few people that were beginning to take computer data, so 3D animations, and be able to transfer that data to film

and then image that data through a multiplex system. Sharon McCormack had been doing some of that work early on. So now we're getting into a number of other terms. There are a number of companies out there that are now making holograms,

and they're using their own terminology. You may hear the term synthogram, and that's being used by Giolef to brand their type of digital hologram. You may hear talk about a rabbit hole, which is, again, basically the same system as the Giola system.

They had combined together to make that technology early on, but then the two companies split. So synthograms and rabbit holes are basically much the same, although I think they are evolving their own research separately now. Another term that's been coming up lately has been synthetic holography.

Jacques Debien, who worked extensively with XYZ imaging, which is now rabbit holes, had done some interesting work, and he has been using the term synthetic holography to describe content that has been generated in the computer

and output to one of these types of systems to define it distinctly from the digital hologram that he refers to, which is the one where you're generating the wave fronts and creating a hologram purely in the computer from totally digital data. I actually prefer to use the term digital holography at this point in time

because I feel that at this point where we need to encourage more and more artists who have skills in digital imaging to be working with holography. And digital holography, for me, defines that realm where they can meet with us.

They are working digitally, and if we're talking about synthetic and rabbit holes and synthograms, I think we're confusing the issue. And I think it's better to be clear. So let's talk a little bit about holography as a fine art medium.

We've been looking at it here now for about 40 years. Margaret Bennion, N.I.E. Stevens, Harriet Cason-Silva, all began around 1968. And we now have a number of artists who have mature bodies of work

through that period of time, but we are still knocking on the door of the fine art establishment. It has been echoed around a lot that it took 100 years for photography to get accepted. I'm hoping that it isn't going to be that long, and I think it is time now to start to really push these aspects

and to knock back actively on the door of the fine art world. At this point, I'd like to mention the fact that I know that John Perry at Holographics North has been working with James Turrell quite extensively now for several years, and most recently has done a body of, I believe it's 36 holograms,

most of which are 6 feet by 38 inches, huge pieces. And I believe three of those pieces are going to be in a major retrospective at the Guggenheim.

He has also been showing at Pace-Wilderstein and two major shows. So we have here a big-name artist whose signature is also selling this for us too, but I think it's really important to notice it and to prepare, because I view it as sort of a wedge into the art world,

that if we can follow behind that wedge and get some other shows out there and get the art world to start taking notice, then this is a golden opportunity that we mustn't ignore. So let's look at some of the issues here.

I want to first of all look at where you can go to get your data transferred into holograms. I think we have to look at the archival properties of these holograms. You know, we've been talking about that here today in relation to how well these holograms are being kept.

There are some interesting points that I think we have to pay attention to here. We need to look at the skills that are required to make masterful holographic art in this medium. Visualizing in 3D. We do that in analog holography. It's a long process of pre-visualization that has honed skills in all of these artists.

You have to be able to see that image in your mind in order to create that hologram with that long process you have of visualization. That is not necessarily true in the 3D animation world, and I'm going to talk a little bit about that aspect too.

We need time to experiment with this new medium. It's expensive. We need to get access to these systems where we can play. Art doesn't just appear overnight. You need time to experiment and trial and error, play with it, exchange.

All of that has to happen for this to really grow. And we really need a system that has the capacity to be flexible. Right now these printing systems are largely fixed printers. You feed the film in one end, you feed your data in,

and a hologram comes out the other that's within certain parameters. I'm really interested in a system that would be available for artists where we can vary those parameters and really push the envelope, as we do with analog holography right now.

So in terms of what's available right now, I'm citing Holographics North first because although theirs is an analog system, they have been transferring digital data into their system through transferring it to film and creating holograms and have been doing this for a very long time.

They have also facilitated many, many artists to do work that I think would never have been done otherwise. And John in himself has been this facilitator, this person who makes it possible for those artists in a flexible and wonderful way. And I applaud you, and I'm so glad you're here

because I think we wouldn't be where we are in holography right now if you hadn't been around. So now rabbit holes media. Rabbit holes were originally XYZ imaging, and they were in collaboration with Giola, and they built this first system.

Oh, XYZ and Giola built the first system, which has now been Rabbit Holes owns parts of it and have their own system. This is a system that's capable of producing large scale, this is like one meter by at least two meters wide.

Theoretically it can be bigger. Full color reflection holography. It is largely being produced in horizontal only parallax because of the computational aspects of how much data is needed to produce an image of that size. But it has the capacity of going to full parallax.

They are available to make. They can make smaller sizes and larger sizes. They have two different sizes of pixels that they can print out at. And they have been working with some artists, mostly 3D animators that have more of a Hollywood background,

but they are open to working with other artists. And I will be working with them for this project at DX Arts in Seattle. They are going to be outputting the holograms that the students are going to be making. Giola has basically the same system.

They're in Lithuania and they have mostly the same parameters. They have developed a camera rail and much of the material you'll see coming from their system tends to be more from a photographically generated content. Although it can handle computer generated, it is doing computer generated

and Paula Dawson has done work with them. Both of these systems are being independently worked on so are being developed further. Dutch Holographic Labs and Walter Spierings has a system, a smaller scale system. I think it's a two-step system. But he does also work with artists

and is available to do data transfer. KHM, the Academy for Media Arts in Cologne, has had a system that was originally from Walter Spierings and Dutch Holographic Labs and is now, they have been teaching students there for some time

who've had pretty free access. Although I think these days, the current administration isn't quite as supportive of holography and it's not clear what the status of that facility is any longer. And the Holocenter in Korea with Joyoung Lee has,

I'm not quite sure how far that system is yet, but I know he's working on a digital system and he has an artist in residence program that is beginning to make his equipment available to other artists. So, archival holography.

We need to be doing accelerated aging tests. All these companies need to be doing accelerating aging tests on holography. We need to know what the lifetime of these materials are. I would encourage you to go on to Holography at Ning and join the forum.

There's a lot of discussion going on there about archival protection of holograms. And we need to also look at the standards that the photographic world has used because photography has gone through all of this in terms of archivally protecting silver halide materials. And I think there's a lot that we can learn from that.

So, in terms of bringing the two worlds together, we have a lot of artists now with experience in 3D animation but have no knowledge of holography. And from what I've seen, in my opinion, without knowing about analog holography and its properties,

you're basically just making holograms that are a hard copy of 3D animation. And I think that holography can do much, much more. And if you're going to find ways to create images that utilize all those properties of holography, you need to understand about holography. And we also have a lot of holographic artists now

with much experience with analog but who have had very little experience in the digital realm. And I'm looking for ways in which we can bridge those gaps, ways that we can work with each other and ways in which we can teach about this new medium.

So I think we need facilities where digital and analog artists can come together and work side by side. I think those should ideally be in conjunction with engineers who we can work with collaboratively so that we can have systems that are state of the art

and that push the envelope. I think we need an open architecture system where we can experiment with it and take it beyond what can be done with conventional printing. And I think it should be a collaborative and open environment.

So I've got some images to show you of course which are going to be totally inadequate because these are just 2D slides of their work. But to give you a little taste of a few of the artists that are working in the medium, this is not an exclusive list by any means

and they're not in any sequence of order. I just want to draw your attention to some of the work that is happening. So Dieter Jung who had been heading up the holography facility in Cologne has been working a lot with dot matrix systems

which make perfect sense with his work too because his work was all about color field. But it is digital content being output in a holographic form and he is making mobiles and large installations now and has been having some major shows in the far east.

My Eun is a student at KHM and I've been intrigued and fascinated by this work. These pieces are portraits. Each of these small pieces in here in this installation is a portrait that has been shot essentially as a holographic stereogram

with photographic content going in but then has been collaged into this large installation piece. So this artist has been able to work with a small format but yet make a large installation piece. Martin Richardson is working in collaboration with Giola.

He is at De Montfort University in England and is teaching graduate level courses in digital holography and his work is more photographically based and he is working with a camera rail that came from Giola. So he is shooting sequences of still photographs

that make up these pieces. But he is also collaging them with 3D animation and working, it's mixing and matching of media. Jacques Débian, these works were done at XYZ imaging when he was working for them.

They're very beautiful pieces that explore, the long piece, the scroll piece, is exploring the idea of the perspective, the way that it was explored in Chinese scroll paintings. So as you walk past the piece,

as you see in the sequence in the piece above, from the one side you see the scroll closed and as you walk past it opens and then the words appear across the top. He also did a book, the book is about, the words when you read them are in old French and they are a history of holography

and the images you see are 3D images that pop up from the page of the book and the pages turn as you move past it and you see further drawings and aspects of holography. Jacques is finishing his PhD right now about holography

and I think he's going to be an interesting contributor. Meets Meyer, he initially had an interest in holography and studied a little bit of analog holography and then when rabbit holes came on the scene he contacted them and he had an extended period of time experimenting.

He's made many pieces with them. He has a long history of 3D animation in the film industry and he was commissioned by SIGGRAPH to do this piece called The Animation Mother for the 3D Animation Festival and it was given as an award at the festival and the images were featured all over the conference

and at an exhibition at Noemann Institute after the conference or during the conference. Waldemar Mathis-Teusch has been working a lot with dot matrix but this is a piece that was done with Walter Spierings at Dutch Holographic Labs and these are just some stills from the sequence of the animation of this piece.

And David Warren, I believe this piece was done at Holographic North, right? And I'm not sure, is that a pulse piece in there? It's all digital, right? Yeah.

So he's combining different media together to make output and has been outputting through John. And Paula Dawson, I've put her last so that I can link for her because she's going to be following and talking about some of her other work. This is a piece that was done output at Giola. She had some major funding from, I believe, the Australian government

to fund the research that went into this piece which was looking at how light was portrayed in Renaissance paintings and how a study of that could then be utilized in terms of how we work with light in holographic images.

So I think that gives you a little bit of a taste of where artists are going and the systems that are happening now and I'll open it up to questions.

Great presentation. We've sort of discussed this, that as these technologies and these two fields of art start to perhaps converge, I guess is the right word. I don't know, in the field of animation and digital arts,

do they have their formal language written and documented better than we do from analog holography? Because we've discussed that we haven't got that really well-defined. We have terms like real image and we have things from the world of optics.

We have three-dimensional shadows that we talk about. We talk about multi-channeling and all those kinds of things, but it isn't really well-defined as a formal art language and I wonder if in the animation world and digital art world, which is sort of newer if they do, do they have their same way of describing their effects that's specific to that field?

That's an interesting question and I think it's one that's changing because right now the animation world is going through change. They are moving into stereo movies with 3D animation and Hollywood is putting big dollars into that right now.

And I recently had an opportunity to meet with Phil McNally, who is the head of stereography at DreamWorks, and he was actually a student of Martin Richardson's and he got his introduction to all of this through holography. So he has a really good vision on all of this

and we had a long discussion about the fact that 3D animators have been working in 3D modeling software, but it's on a 2D screen. So that they are then outputting for a 2D screen, and they have been up until recently, and now they're moving into the world of stereography

and they need to visualize in 3D and then they visualize in like a half 3D world right now because it's been through this sequential imaging on a 2D screen. So a lot of that is in flux right now for them and the whole industry is in flux

because they're evolving a new language for how to deal with 3D space in the 2D movie field. And I think there's a lot of carryover between the two. As I've been listening to papers being presented at other conferences by filmmakers who are dealing with these issues,

I've been noticing the analogies and I think that there's a really fertile place for us all to be in that discussion and perhaps at forums like this, it would be good to have filmmakers who are interested in 3D participating too because I think we can define a lot of those terms together.

Just a quick note. That was a great presentation. I was very happy to see some artists I've never heard of on there. That was beautiful. I too have spent actually the last couple of years

keeping abreast of the whole stereographic movement in video and cinema, and it is actually huge. There was a consortium formed back in April of last year called 3D at Home, and all of the television manufacturers, Mitsubishi, JVC, and it's just the whole list, Philips,

have gotten together to establish standards for home television. I just wanted to say one last thing. You can actually walk into a consumer store today and buy a 3D-ready HDTV for under $1,000 and a 30-some-odd inch for anyone involved in stereography,

stereopaths, as Steve Benton used to call them. That's a fantastic thing. Yeah, it is. I think there's a realm of overlap there, a doorway we can get into. Hi, Sally.

I'm wondering if there's some way, like I'm not well versed in 3D graphics, and for other artists who aren't per se too, if there's some way we could put together a forum where either you're teaching it or bringing some people in to help holographers, because I've been looking at this idea,

but how to make our transitions, because sometimes it's just through certain programs, other times it's a conceptual leap as well, but that would help from our side being able to then have the same kind of discussions the other way as well. I think it would be a great idea.

I mean, the doorway that I've opened at DXR, through this grant with the International Holography Fund, that's a course that's being taught as creative 3D as opposed to a course in 3D animation in Maya, right? So these are students that have a year-long course in 3D that they start learning with Maya, but they've been making 3D movies with stereo HD.

They've been making lenticular, and now they're going to make a hologram, and I think that that's a very fertile place, but I think we need to look at some way to go back in the other direction too. You know, that group of students were like my prime students coming from the 3D world, 3D animation world,

but I think we need to find ways to bridge back the other way too, so I'm totally open to anything in that direction.