MIT Museum in Cambridge's Kendall Square. Photo courtesy Weiss/Manfredi.
The MIT Museum in Boston has long owned the most comprehensive collection of holograms in the world, with more than 2,000 examples by some of the world’s foremost holographers. Historic holograms in the unique collection include the first reflection holograms, the first laser-transmission hologram, and the first white-light transmission hologram, created by holography and 3-D imaging pioneer Stephen Benton. It’s an amazing anthology of one of media technology’s most sophisticated platforms.
The only problem might have been finding it.
The museum’s approximately 2,300 holograms have have been largely inaccessible to the public for the past three-and-a-half years, moved to an offsite facility as the MIT Museum prepared to relocate to a new 57,000-square-foot medley of galleries and state-of-the-art program spaces that opened in late 2022 on Main Street in Cambridge’s Kendall Square with new artifacts and topics.
That’s scheduled to change this summer, when the MIT Museum re-establishes their hologram collection and unveils an exhibition that commemorates the Benton estate’s donation and his considerable contributions to holography. The exhibition, entitled Optiker, opened June 28 and will run for about a year. Visitors will be able to view several seminal holograms, including Benton’s signature Head of Aphrodite ("The Bartlett Head"), Rind II, Motif I (which dates back to 1968 — positively ancient by holographic epochs), and works by macro photographer Fritz Goro and pioneering holographer Yuri Denisyuk. They’re a fraction of the museum’s holographic inventory, which also includes works by artists Rudie Berkhout, Harriet Casdin-Silver, Melissa Crenshaw and others. The museum also showcases practical applications such as a holographic image made of the remains of the 2,000-year-old Lindow Man, discovered in a bog in England, that demonstrate the use of holography for anthropological, educational, and archival purposes.
A Perceptual Divide
Holography’s inherently abstruse nature may also have contributed to this treasure trove of holographic gems’ lengthy sequestration. Actual holograms — exactingly crafted using lasers split into reference and object beams whose resulting interference pattern creates the image — are regularly conflated in the public’s perception with Star Wars-type digital chimeras. (“Help me Obi-Wan Kenobi, you're my only hope!”) Even the “appearance” of the late Tupac Shakur at the 2012 Coachella music festival is still widely misrepresented as a hologram; it was actually an iteration of Pepper’s Ghost, a Victorian-era theatrical illusion. If ever a technology needed a central repository and knowledge bank, it’s holograms.
However, MIT’s hologram collection rarely had a single dedicated curator. Instead, the task has been handed off among several people over three decades, including Benton himself early on, which produced only several small showings over the years. Then, a turning point: a significant exhibition in October, 2022 brought in over 20,000 visitors — triple the number of previous annual visitors, underscoring the illusion’s allure. “For a place that had been seeing six or seven [thousand per year before], that was a real milestone,” says Deborah Douglas, Senior Director of Collections and Curator of Science and Technology at the MIT Museum. Before that, she says, “We were a really small shop, in a sort of dark, far corner of the campus on the second floor in an old industrial building. It was just time to do it.”
“After they moved the collection to the museum at MIT and put up the first exhibition, it really put the MIT museum on the map,” recalls Seth Riskin, Studio Director, MIT Museum Studio and Compton Gallery, who had earlier overseen the collection of holograms at the museum. “There were lines out the door. The MIT museum, at the time, was not the most well-known place and sort of a homegrown operation in an old industrial building on the edge of campus. And so the collection of holograms, and then the accessibility of holographic images and the excitement that they generated, really drew the public into the museum.”
Benton’s Bridge
Benton’s oeuvre forms the spiritual core of the MIT Museum’s hologram collection, which dates back to his early work, mentored and encouraged by Polaroid cofounder Edwin Land, who was a professor at MIT when Benton was an undergrad there in the mid 1960s (he would go on to cofound MIT’s Media Lab in 1987). Benton’s diverse development of holographic imaging, such as the so-called “rainbow” hologram, as well as adding color and stereographic imaging, created the foundations for practical applications such as the holograms routinely used on credit cards and ID cards.
Benton would become holography’s “evangelist,” says Douglas. “He really is a bridge figure between industry engineers, scientists, and artists. He single-handedly creates more collaborative ventures and efforts than I think anyone else in the field. He brought enterprise to the notion of holography, as well. Just like Edwin Land, his mentor, he did not like to see rigid boundaries between art and science, technology and culture.”
The collection was further buttressed by the acquisition, in 1993, of all the assets of the Museum of Holography, a New York institution that was auctioned that year to satisfy a bankruptcy judgment. The final bid of $180,000 for what was described as “the world's premier collection of historical, technical and artistic holography” was surprisingly low; as a trade publication’s post-mortem of the event noted, “…not only did the Museum fall on hard times in recent years, but so did the holographic art market and holographic artists in general.”
But it also reflects holography’s perceptual ambiguity: is it a technology or an art form? “I suspect that it falls into a kind of fascinating interstitial space, which is, it’s too technical to be thought of as art and too… esoteric to be thought of as mainstream,” suggests Douglas, who has helped lead the transition to the new museum facility.
The argument, she says, is less about whether it’s an art form or a type of technology — for the record, it’s very much both — than about how to convey its true nature. “People have a tendency to think of a hologram as kind of a special kind of photograph, but imagine tearing a photograph in half: you would have half of the image on one side and half of the image on the other side,” says Douglas. “But if you cut a hologram in half, you actually still would have the whole image, but now two of them. All it shares in common with a photograph is the idea that there are light-sensitive chemicals coating a piece of media, and that it uses visible light as a source of recording information. But everything else about it is actually quite distinctive.”
That, in turn, makes creating a holographic exhibit especially challenging. “It's not like an archives box, where I can bring out a bunch of slides,” says Douglas. “There are dozens of types of holograms, and [each] needs to be viewed under certain light conditions: ones that are lit from the front, from the back, from above, from below, from an angle, from the side. I have a box right next to me, and every one of the ten holograms in it has to be lit differently. It means that even small displays are very complicated in the planning process, and it requires considerable expertise.”
Unlike two-dimensional art or graphics, presenting holograms can be “fussy,” she says. Efforts to make them less so can seem like mini Manhattan Projects by comparison to other museum exhibitions. Douglas cites Zebra Imaging, a 3-D holographic imaging company spun out of Benton’s MIT Media Lab in 1996 that developed a 3D “Dynamic Display,” capable of rendering (single frame or still) holograms in real time that can present multiple perspectives of a holographic image simultaneously and independently to all viewers from any perspective. The company’s technology was at one point funded by DARPA, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency that develops cutting-edge military systems such as hypersonic missiles. It makes the technology used to protect da Vinci’s Mona Lisa seem like a cheap padlock by comparison.
The Paradox of Holography
But it also underscores the challenge of trying to present the fullness of what a hologram can be to a broader audience. Douglas says an intended effect of the summer exhibition is to remind people of holography’s practical ubiquity — the credit card, the passport, even some national currencies contain holographic images. “A hologram can offer a sense of authenticity,” says the Boston-area resident, noting that the grounds crew at the Red Sox’ Fenway Park will collect milestone home-run balls and imprint them with a hologram to validate them. “It can’t be copied or scanned. It’s how we value something as the real thing.”
Seth Riskin, who has worked with holograms as an artist himself while also helping manage MIT’s collection, says the technology has an intrinsically paradoxical nature, one that makes it both compelling but also intimidatingly mysterious. “‘Hologram’ is a very easy word to use, but how it’s commonly used has nothing to do with reality,” he observes. “Holography is still the most information-rich, highest fidelity, [visually] natural method of 3D imaging that we have, and yet it never has come into the mainstream because the technology behind it isn’t easy to understand.”
But it’s also an experience that needs human interaction to exist, like the sound of a tree falling in the forest. “It's something that is deeply rooted in the physics of the natural world and the physics of light and the human brain,” he says. “The image doesn't exist outside the intersection of the human brain and light waves, and I think that's why it's not broadly appreciated. But if we do become aware and think about it, we realize that we're touching on something that is fundamental to the human experience in a way once removed, and then it's very much the engagement of our brains and the natural world.”