Dan Schweitzer

Pioneer of Holographic Art, 1946 – 2001

“My fascination for holography stems from my attraction to the light and the ability to “sculpt” this energy. Light, it seems to me, is the most effective medium to use when attempting to visualize an idea. Ideas themselves seem to be composed of light. It is the metaphorical behavior of light that compels me to record it as signposts in my travel to examine thought, reality, and our perception of them.”

Dan Schweitzer created the New York Holographic Laboratories with Sam Moree and then co-founded the HoloCenter with Ana Maria Nicholson in 1998. He explored constructed holographic images, often using miniature scenes to place the viewer ‘inside’ larger optical spaces and devices to puncture the image plane.

“My fascination for holography stems from my attraction to the light and the ability to “sculpt” this energy. Light, it seems to me, is the most effective medium to use when attempting to visualize an idea. Ideas themselves seem to be composed of light. It is the metaphorical behavior of light that compels me to record it as signposts in my travel to examine thought, reality, and our perception of them. Through this pursuit to portray and analyze the nature of light, I have tried to provide a reasonable context for the abstractions that result. I have attempted to concentrate on creating images that could capture the viewer’s attention and draw him/her into the work and to surrender to the context and reality of the image before them. I suppose because of my background in the theatre, my choice of presentation of imagery has been, in general, narrative, not necessarily linearly so. As time is often a theme, many of the images involve the use of special effects devices to create some kinetic event. To me holography has always been a kind of cinema. I have counter- balanced this event over time with a static tableaux to allow the spatial relationships to play out as the viewer scans the available parallax from left to right. It was not enough to simply show a new experiment with my devices but I wanted to feature it in a reasonable context. The tableaux becomes enriched and bathed in the presence of the sculpted energy before it. In general, however, it was often the optical animation which propelled me to the holography table. A number of finished artworks resulted from these studies, some of which I’d like to highlight in my search for the ultimate tableaux.”

-Dan Shweitzer

Dan Schweitzer, MOVIE THEATRE (1978), 5” x 7″

        -Excerpt from the essay originally at ART IN HOLOGRAPHY-2, Nottingham, England and formally presented at HOLOGRAPHIC NETWORK conference, Berlin, Germany, Oct. 1996

Full text online: http://xalrazutis.org/alchemists/visual_alchemy/wave2000-4.html