Exploring Holography through Science and Art

Abstract

While a physics student at the University of Vermont (UVM), I found great satisfaction in supplementing my studies with time in the darkroom. As an avid photographer, I carried my camera everywhere and would sneak off to the darkroom to create images, often working without noticing that the sun had risen. I enjoyed this time so much I decided that I might as well get credit for my efforts; I started taking my 'art' a little more seriously, enrolling in classes through the art department and eventually obtaining an art degree along with my physics degree. During this time, I found myself becoming a little schizophrenic, appreciating the mathematical squiggles on the blackboard in the physics classroom as if the board were a Jackson Pollock painting. It was quite by chance that I became involved in the holography lab at UVM, which was run by John Perry, but the medium was the perfect way to bring my two interests together. My last 2 years of college were focused on studying the physics of color and optics, and holography. One of my first holographic installations was an array of 8-x-1 0-in rainbow holograms hung in a circle around a single illumination source (completed for a senior art show in 1983). The images were of diffraction patterns created by projecting light onto a ground-glass screen, then overlapping these patterns in space in the final transfers. To me this seemed the best place to start-making images in a diffraction-based medium with the subject being diffraction itself. At this time, I knew I wanted to pursue holography further. The Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) was the only school I could find in the United States that had a graduate program in display holography, so I applied. My timing was perfect. That was the first year of the program, and MIT wasjust the right place for me to continue the work