Passersby treated to a light-bending experience
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It's not quite like CNN beaming correspondent Jessica Yellin's likeness into the studio to chat with Wolf Blitzer election night, but holograms of two human figures appear in the Front Street windows of the MIT Museum at dusk every night.
The works are part of "Luminous Windows: Holograms for the 21st Century," a recently opened exhibition at the museum that displays six holographic works of art in the museum windows. The pieces are illuminated in their full three-dimensional aspects every evening and, once lit, are visible from the street.
"Holograms have not often been shown in this way, in the public domain with all the passersby, the cars, and the other lights," said Seth Riskin, who created the exhibit. "This kind of intersection between artistic achievement, the urban environment and the public experience is quite unusual."
During the official window lighting earlier this month, a crowd assembled on the sidewalk in front of the museum, shivering in the growing darkness and cold, and counted down as the curtains rose, revealing six eye-popping images behind the museum's window panes. People gathered around the works and moved from side to side to see the images revolve through three dimensions.
Perspective was the key to seeing the images: from the side, many of them appeared as blank screens, but a closer look straight on revealed two gigantic pairs of sunglasses, a white medicine cabinet, and a woman leaning forward, all jutting out from the screens on which they were presented.
"It's like the 3-D movies or
More holograms were on display inside the museum, where Williams became enamored of the life-sized one of Bob Marley. Holding his hand up to the screen and watching it pass through Marley's outstretched arm, he exclaimed, "It's awesome!"
The museum is an especially appropriate venue for the exhibition because "MIT itself, ever since the 1970s, has been a significant player in the development of holography," said museum director John Durant, noting that past MIT president Charles Vest was an expert on holography. "We have in our collection materials which reflect that tradition."
Betsy Connors, a Cambridge native who was the museum's first curator, has been working in holography for almost 25 years.
"In the collection are the first holograms ever made," she explained. "If you could go back in time to 1839 when photography was first created and have every first daguerreotype and notes from every scientist who was developing the technology at the time, that's what's at the museum, which is what makes it the best and most valuable collection in the world."
Connors continues to work as an artist and educator in holography and "Light Rain," one of her works, was among the six that the museum's selection committee chose from 30 international entries submitted for the current show.
"The selections were made based on two joint criteria: artistic content and technical achievement," said exhibition creator Riskin. "Works that displayed these two qualities and that could work on the scale that we had in mind of the outdoor public space narrowed things down to a range of works."
To create her piece, Connors cut holographic images of trees and plants into narrow shards and hung them on robotic controllers that move the shards back and forth "to create the effect of wind and light."
"I think of [holography] as painting with light," she said, although the technology involved is more complex. Likening the process of recording light waves for a hologram to that of recording sound waves for a CD, she said, "You have an object or subject, and laser light is reflected off of it, and it's recorded on a piece of film or glass and displayed back with a white lens."
It's tricky to explain how a hologram truly works, Connors said. "Most people think holograms are like Star Wars holograms projected out into space."
"It's the Princess Leia confusion," Riskin said. "Star Wars had a hologram-like image of Princess Leia, and there have been many films that included holograms but not in an accurate way. The Wolf Blitzer thing on CNN on election night was right in line with that."
Calling CNN's technique of "beaming" correspondents into the studio "a made-for-television kind of trick," Riskin said that "in display holography, you can't have a 3-D image in space somewhere . . . You need something for the light to interact with.
"So will people be walking down Mass. Ave. and run into a holographic being? Well, no, it doesn't quite work that way."
Nevertheless, researchers at the MIT Media Lab are working on technology that will make video holography a possibility: "You'd have a 3-D TV set somewhere down the track, if that works out, with moving three-dimensional images," said museum director Durant.
"We can't bend light yet the way they are doing in movies," Connors laughed.
But "if science fiction can imagine what holography is," she said, "we should move in that direction."
