Lessons from the Hologram

This chapter explores the lessons that scholars of digital cultures can take from the reception of a “new media” of a previous era: the optical hologram. The optical hologram first emerged in the United States in the early 1960s, prompting enthusiastic and outlandish predictions about its future applications, ranging from holographic cinema to virtual architecture. Although the hologram promised new modes of virtual experience, this chapter argues that, paradoxically, its reception has been determined extensively by material constraints. It charts how today viewing holograms is reliant on access to technical equipment and niche expertise, and often leaves art historians and scholars of media attempting to reconstruct the hologram’s aesthetic effects from a legacy of uninstalled equipment, inadequate photographic reproductions and archival documents. Yet, the chapter argues that the resulting inadvertent emphasis on the hologram’s materiality indirectly fueled an engagement with the hologram as a theoretical rather than a technical object. Ultimately, it suggests that artists’ engagement with the old “new media” of the hologram offers valuable insights about the fate that awaits recent digitally-engaged artworks reliant on the contingent infrastructures of software and networked platform ecosystems.