First published in Creative Holography Index, The
International Catalogue for Holography, Vol. 2, No. 1, 1994,
Monand Press, Bergisch Gladbach, Germany, n.p.n
My holography work investigates the nature of language and its
relationship
to visuality, issues that are of interest both to literature and
the visual arts, particularly as explored by experimental poetry
and conceptual art.
I create what I call holographic poems, or holopoems, which are
essentially
digital holograms that address language both as material and
subject matter.
I create visual texts which can only signify upon the active perceptual and cognitive engagement on the part of the reader or viewer. This ultimately means that each reader "writes" his or her own texts as he or she looks at the piece. My holopoems don't rest quietly on the surface. When the viewer starts to look for words and their links, the texts will transform themselves, move in three-dimensional space, change in color and meaning, coalesce and disappear. This viewer-activated choreography is as much a part of the signifying process as the transforming verbal and visual elements themselves.
Language plays a fundamental role in the constitution of our experiential world. To question the structure of language is to investigate how realities are constructed. My holograms define a linguistic experience that takes place outside syntax and conceptualize instability as a key signifying agent. I use holography and computer holography to blur the frontier between words and images and to create an animated syntax that stretches words beyond their meaning in ordinary discourse. I employ computer animation techniques to create a new kind of visual-poetic composition, which undermines fixed states (i.e., words charged visually or images enriched verbally) and which could be defined as a constant oscillation between them. My conceptual holography is both an investigation of the processes of language and of holographic meaning.
The temporal and rhythmic structure of my works play an important role in creating this tension between visual language and verbal images. Most of my pieces deal with time as non-linear (i.e., discontinuous) and reversible (i.e., flowing in both directions), in such a way that the viewer/reader can move up or down, back and forth, from left to right, at any speed, and still be able to establish associations between words present in the ephemeral perceptual field.
The use of computers and holography reflects my desire to create experimental texts that move language, and more specifically, written language, beyond the linearity and rigidity that characterize its printed form. I never adapt existing texts to holography. I try to investigate the possibility of creating works that emerge from a genuine holographic syntax.
Eduardo Kac
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