“Hey look!” said my friend Joe from the backseat of my car. “It’s 4:20.” The four of us had just lit a joint, and the Museum of Holography closed at five.
Our hostess came into focus as we tramped up the stairs and into a small gallery and gift shop: a hobbitlike elderly woman with gray hair in a perfectly curled-under bowl cut, small, dark eyes, and tiny, smoke-colored rectangular frames perched at the end of her nose. “I’m going to need $4 from each of you,” she told us.
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I’ll be damned if I remember much; I was concentrating too hard on looking serious. But it probably started something like this, from the museum’s homemade-looking Web site: “Holography is an outgrowth of the most advanced science and technology of our age. In the simplest terms it is the ability to produce three-dimensional representations down to molecular exactness. It promises to have a profound effect on every area and field of human endeavor–engineering, architecture, the arts, entertainment and advertising. As a concept that is only approximately 50 years old, its potential as a practical reality did not even begin to be realized until the development of a workable laser in the early 1960s . . .”
We moved into the royal-blue-carpeted main gallery, where images of a pig-size tarantula, a man painting a swirl, and a hungry shark appeared in clear plates suspended from the ceiling. Four-foot-tall cylinders housed tiny rotating holographic movies–Michael Jordan passing a ball behind his back, a woman admiring herself in a mirror, Mike Royko smiling. More, um, creative work by Ron and Bernadette Olsen melded holograms with large-format photography (of, say, a woman carrying a framed holographic portrait of herself).
Billings was at the gift counter as we emerged, spinning a dozen or so discs imprinted with abstract holographic patterns. There was no way we were getting out of there gracefully without hearing what those were all about.
Joe dropped to the floor in a fit of laughter, hugged his knees to his chin, and tried to focus on a glass case of holographic earrings.
Art accompanying story in printed newspaper (not available in this archive): photos/Andrea Beno.
