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Holographic Knowledge and Non-Reproducibility Academia

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Holographic Knowledge and Non-Reproducibility Academia Jens Schröter Holographic knowledge and non-reproducibility UNPUBLISHED TRANSLATION 1. The marginality of holography as an illusion Holography is not one of the central themes of media studies, in Germany at least.1 Media history normally addresses mass media, such as cinema, radio, television and “computers”, which form the “canon” of research into media science.2 But there are also no references to holography in the more specialised histories of “optical media”.3 If holography is mentioned at all, then it is in a distorted form. So, in an otherwise ground-breaking text about the role of photographic images for the practice of pornography by Linda Williams. Holography appears unexpectedly here in a footnote: “[...], there now seems good reason to question the underlying notion that the entire prehistory of cinema from the camera obscura to holograph represents a continuous line of the Western metaphysical ideology of the visible.”4 Holography seems here - in a footnote dedicated to the so-called apparatus debate - to be part of the prehistory of cinema, which is neither historically nor systematically correct.5 Williams pigeon-holes holography into a line between camera obscura and cinema, subsuming it - as will become even clearer - into a field of knowledge completely foreign to holography. If you speculate what the reasons for this sweeping absence of holography could be, indications are provided in the last paragraph. In the heterogeneous field of media science(s), there are the traditions that are mainly based on communication theory, on one hand, which refer back to the research into mass media and mass communications. However, holography has not (yet?) become a mass medium like cinema, radio, television or (if you want to include it) computer-mediated communications (email, internet). In 1996, Brian Winston discussed the question as to why holographic cinema or television had not yet become established: Initially, there were considerable technical difficulties. It is not at all clear how the enormous informative content of holography would allow transmission. Winston notes that it would definitely be possible to solve some of the difficulties with enough research, yet “no supervening social necessity is accelerating such a development”.6 There was no social “pressure” to develop holographic 3D cinema. Above all, the television industries are really striving to spread HDTV and flatscreens (this is even more the case now, in 2008, than at the point at which Winston wrote his text): “New display 1 The only major and detailed study into its history is Sean Johnston: Holographic Visions. A History of New Science, Oxford 2006. 2 See, for example, the impressive study by Gebhard Rusch et al.: Theorien der neuen Medien. Kino – Radio – Fernsehen – Computer, Paderborn 2007. 3 See Ulrike Hick: Geschichte der optischen Medien, Munich 1999 – This study simply breaks off at cinema. But also in Friedrich Kittler: Optical media. Berlin lectures 1999, Cambridge, UK 2011, Reprinted (Transl. by Anthony Enns), there is no reference to holography. 4 Linda Williams: "Corporealized observers: Visual Pornography and the ‘Carnal Density of Vision’", in: Patrice Petro (Ed.): Fugitive Images: From Photography to Video, Bloomington, Indiana 1995, P. 3-41, here P. 39 FN. 5 See also Hartmut Winkler: Der filmische Raum und die Zuschauer. "Apparatus" – Semantik – "Ideology", Heidelberg 1992, P. 19-76. 6 Brian Winston: Technologies of Seeing: Photography, Cinematography and Television, London 1996, P. 116. technologies (flat screens) are also being heavily developed and will obviously mesh with digital HDTV. Not until all this is diffused, a matter for more than one decade, will an industrial and commercial window open up for holographic television."7 According to Winston, only when commercial interests make transmittable holographic moving images possible, they would they become suitable for communication and could, by implication, become an object of communication studies. On the other hand, the more culturalist traditions of media studies, which tend to arise from aisthetical or aesthetical disciplines, such as art history, tend to focus on questions of a - as Williams writes - “ideology of the visual”, meaning on questions regarding the observer’s subject position, such as in debates on central perspective. Even beyond such critical ideologically informed positions such as apparatus theory, it is always about the “observers” and what the images make with them (or vice versa).8 However even up to now, holography has had at best a marginal position in the art system.9 Holography seems simply to be too marginal, too little established, not visible enough, too poorly aligned to the mass public or to the “observer” to deserve any attention. Perhaps this is the case. But perhaps it just seems like this because of the fixation of different traditions of media studies on communication or aesthetic appearance.10 This is the thesis of this article: Holography has become accepted, it has become established, it is commonplace and is used routinely by the much-evoked “masses” - but not on the level of visual perception and communication. You can easily check this, dear reader. Take your wallet, remove a bank note or your ID card (you can’t get anything more common than this) and take a look. You will notice colourful, iridescent elements - elements which rely on holographic procedures. These, although naturally visible and also equipped with a certain aisthetic stimuli, are not primarily created to be noticed by you. These elements are not intended to communicate anything visual and their aesthetic quality is just an accessory. They are on your banknotes and ID cards for another reason: They are to prevent (alongside other methods) you from being able to forge money or identification - i.e. they are virtually impossible to reproduce. Consequently, they are intended to make money and identification cards impossible to reproduce. They are intended to stabilise the difference between the original and any copy - a difference which simply continues to exist contrary to some post-modern discourses. A difference, which has no lesser task in the case of personal ID than to guarantee what you doubtlessly have as your most personal and intimate possession - your identity. Your identity is not your most personal, pre-technical possession. It is only 7 Winston: Technologies of Seeing, loc. cit., P. 117. See also Brian Winston: Media Technology and Society. A History: From the Telegraph to the Internet, London, New York 1996, P. 337-342. 8 Or about observers of either gender, as Linda Williams rightly insists. 9 See also the discouraging results from surveys about the status of holography for the art system, carried out in 1989, documented in: D. Tulla Lightfoot: "Contemporary Art-World Bias in Regard to Display Holography: New York City", in: Leonardo, vol. 22, No. 3/4, 1989, P. 419-423. 10 In terms of Martin Seel: Aesthetics of Appearing, Stanford, California 2005 (Transl. by John Farrell). secured and, thus, created through such external technology of identification.11 Go to a bank without your identification card and try to obtain the central medium of capitalist society, money,12 try to travel without identification card to a country outside of the Schengen Area. You can protest as often as you like and in tears that you are you - no-one will believe you if you cannot submit a piece of identification furnished with tamper-proof holography (or similar technologies). You will arouse extreme suspicion if you dare to present a photocopy of your identification card (or your credit card). You are only you “in person” thanks to the holography of your original identification card, among other things. The Federal Printing Office, responsible for the development of such (and other) security technology on your banknotes and identity documents, notes in an official document, not without a telltale pathos: “The security and protection of individual identities is a basic requirement and basic right of modern citizens. Reliably documenting them with state-of-the-art means of high security technology and protecting them against all conceivable third-party attacks was and is the fundamental tasks and the ultimate aim of our work in the Federal Printing Office.”13 The fact that a “third party” can even endanger the “individual identity” shows how little the latter is independent of the former. Holography is, in this context, a medium which first of all creates the individual identity, to put it bluntly, - this cannot be flamed as unimportant, superfluous, marginal and uninteresting. "Whilst the critics […] condemn holography as worthless however, the actual world-wide use of holograms on products, packaging and documents continues to grow every year […]."14 It is only the fixation on the visual perhaps due to the “ideology of vision” - taken to be focused on the eyes of the “masses” or “observers” - that obstructs the central and routine role of the optical medium (see 2) of holography. As this last sentence already implies, this article will make a differentiation at the end - between visual and optical media (see 3). 2. Holographic knowledge and non-reproducibility The source of the non-reproducibility of holography is in its epistemology, the “fields of constitution”15, from which it originates. The intention here is not to reconstruct the history of holography en detail. That would go beyond the scope of this essay. It is enough to state that a central condition of the feasibility of holography is the (re)discovery of wave optics in the 19th century.16 The underlying idea of holography, to record the interference pattern between the wavefronts of two coherent light sources, assumes the 11 On the ever-increasing number of “identity thefts”, a major problem especially for finance, see Chris Jay Hoofnagle: "Identity Theft. Making the Known Unknowns Known", in: Harvard Journal of Law & Technology, Vol. 21, No. 1, 2007, P.
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