Jerry Sit In At The Sphere?

I remember seeing the Frank Zappa hollow-gram tour that his son Ahmet put on about 8 years ago. Good musicians, bad idea.

It was terrible. I'm sure the technology has improved, but I'd never go to another one.

i would literally throw shit at bob and the rest of the living musicians. do i really need to start bringing a sack of tomatoes to shows?

At Highgate 94, I stayed at a campground right next to the venue and the night before the show, you could stand by the fence and watch the crew set up and test the lighting rig.   They projected a giant holograph Jerry in a chef's hat over the field.   That was the only time I saw it and don't think they ever used it at a show.

On some level, Frank Zappa would have enjoyed the idea of someone throwing a rutabaga at his holographic image during "Call Any Vegerable".

I'm in for the Garcia / 2 Pac duet gig

All Eyez On Me > Eyes Of The World

Friend Of The Devil > Only God Can Judge Me

To Live And Die in L.A. > West L.A. Fadeaway

Something like that

1. You cannot project beams of light in mid air like in Star Wars. When you project light, it goes forever, unless it bounces off a cloud, smoke, etc .and back to your eyeball. Moving images projected on smoke and clear surfaces are not holograms, no matter how realistic they are.

2. Very simply, holograms are recordings of patterns of light, usually unto a piece of film. Later in the process one can reconstruct / regenerate these patterns for someone to see. Sometimes these patterns are portraits of a person.

3. Jerry was asked to sit for a real hologram portrait in the early 90s. He declined. The equipment was available and ready in Santa Cruz. The equipment includes a laser, used to illuminate the subject and the film. There was no practical way to make a full color (realistic color) holographic portrait at that time.

4. No one gives a shit about real scientific definitions anymore -- the world is going to hell.

Here some photos of real holograms. Unlike a photo, you can move from right to left  / top to bottom and see "around" he image (i.e. it has depth). Sometimes when the viewer stands in front of a hologram, parts of the image can project out of the frame.

Notice that the holographic portraits above are actual size. An average size of a portrait is 12" x 16 " because this is the size of the film supplied by the manufacturer. You can put them in a frame and hang them on a wall. 

With some exceptions, if you see something bigger than the real thing, it is not a hologram. That's because the lenses used to magnify (or conversely reduce) the image end up distorting the final image.

You can get a holographic portrait taken for several thousand dollars at just a few facilities in the States. Old ones cost about the same.

Last year I helped sell a portrait of Boy George that was made in the mid 80s. Something like that cost about $10,000 if it's signed and numbered.

hologram of woman in frame

Small holographic portraits mass replicated on plastic film with automated machinery cost about $100 each. It's not apparent in this particular photo, but the brim of the woman's hat projects several inches off the surface, if you stand in directly front of the hologram at eye-level. You can reach out an pass your fingers thru the image of the hat. It's pretty cool to see / experience it.

Fascinating.  Who's the cowgirl, Alan?

Hi Jaz. Hope you are well and wish I could be there for the eclipse. Enjoy!

(Sorry to sound all school-teachery but holography is one of the few things I can ramble about more than superficially.) She's a customer of a colleague who runs one of the few remaining holographic portrait studios left in the world. The folks that can make holograms of people have rare super-fast lasers that shoot out a pulse of laser light. Exposures are measured in nano-seconds.  Lots of naked people have been used as models, in an attempt to commercialize the technology. 

However, most holographers are only equipped to record images of stationary objects (because nothing can move during the recording process). Their exposure are measures in seconds.

Here's a hologram I made of one of my sculptures pre-covid.

Here's a portrait of me chiseling a piece of marble. The ultra-fast laser was even able to "freeze" a piece of marble flying across the room. In the final hologram it "floats" in front of the surface.

In a recent art exhibition, I displayed the original sculpture and the hologram of that sculpture side-by-side. It was pretty cool to compare an image made from solid rock and one made from photons.

Here's a kind of crappy hologram I made a long time ago. It's 3 views of the same image showing how you can see "around" the image as you change perspective.

Well what do you call all that other stuff?

Just projections. It's often 2D movie or video footage projected onto smoke, water droplets, or a near invisible screen. Historically, it's called Pepper's Ghost:

"Pepper's ghost is an illusion technique, used in the theatre, cinema, amusement parks, museums, television, and concerts, in which an image of an object off-stage is projected so that it appears to be in front of the audience. The technique is named after the English scientist John Henry Pepper (1821–1900), who popularized the effect with a theater demonstration in 1862. This launched an international vogue for ghost-themed plays which used this novel stage effect during the 1860s and subsequent decades"

Not a sexy-sounding as calling it a "hologram." But like Kleenex or Frigidaire, the word has been co-opted by common usage. That's just the way it is.

> There was no practical way to make a full color (realistic color) holographic portrait at that time.

So how is it that we see these in like a false color mask? Is it some kind of prismatic effect?

Ramble on. I find this kind of stuff fascinating.

Hi Mike - 

I'm generalizing, but up until the mid/late 90s, no one made any "full color film" and multicolor lasers were super expensive. The film is hard to make, and requires corporate resources (like DuPont) to mass produce it. It's not cost-effective for them to make it for art or portraiture. 

Now the red. blue, and green lasers that you need are cheap but no one is making large sheets of film (big enough to shoot a portrait). Here's a hologram from 1998, made by a large Japanese company, that went on a cover of a book I edited. It's 4" x 5". 

And yes, it is prismatic in a way.

Most often, holography is a two-part process, analogous to recording sound waves. You first record light waves using specialize equipment. This is typically done in a lab or studio equipped with a laser, a bunch of optical equipment to bounce the laser around where you want it, a piece of photo-sensistve emulsion (film) and a darkroom (where you develop the film). Laser light is required to record an image for various reasons -- it doesn't burn the film -- it is just used a a clean and pure light source. (A hologram is technically an interference pattern recorded on a piece of film, though there are other ways to achieve the same effect.)

Then you play the hologram recording back later to see it (which for practical purposes, we shine a spot light on the hologram). 

Depending on the type of hologram you made, the exposed and developed film reflects and focuses that spotlight back to your eyeball so you see the desired image.

In many finished holograms, as you walk past it, you see different bands of the light reflected back to your eyes, so it looks "rainbow-y."

A laser lab:

a laser (rectangular box to the right). It is a red continuous wave laser and does not shoot the pulse required to shoot a portrait.

Ha I'm only including this because I notice I'm rocking a Phil Lesh and Friends shirt (which was already 15 years old at the time). We are everywhere!

I'm standing in front of the master hologram and a copying apparatus. The master hologram is a glass plate (film) that was previously exposed to laser light. You need to make a second gen hologram to be able to view the image under an ordinary spotlight (and not laser light).

>>>>>When you project light, it goes forever, unless it bounces off a cloud, smoke, etc

That holographic Jerry I saw at Highgate was projected on a cloud of smoke they shot above the field. 

Ken that sounds like something me and my buddies would do. Great visual prank. Giant Jerry (sounds like it's from Cooking with Jerry video December 31, 1987). But not a hologram.

We used to shoot colored slides and trippy pictures from our hotel window onto the sides of hotels across the street.  JUst using some high powewd slide projectors

That was big fum, especially when there were a group of highrises outside a venue, like in Richmond, VA (85 was a hoot). Walk out and the Marriot was purple and green. Best Western yellow and blood red. Hilon, coveed by black and white triangles. They never did catch us. Good times and much laughter after a show. Now it's a thing.

killer

Serious knowledge drop Alan 

This conversation is stirring up memories of the holograph gallery on the beach in SF, and the camera obscura that's there too. Another kind of photon magic, but in real time and true color.

Bss - Yeah, sharing knowledge is the shit -- especially as we age. So little time and so much to learn. I could spend days listening to you talk about audio, Ken talk about law, Noodler talk about mining, Dave talk about music, etc, etc, etc. Not to mention learning how to grow weed. And fishing -- add that to my list...

The collective knowledge of Zoners must be truly outstanding. That's one of the reasons this is my only social media --- learn something new everyday. With a great soundtrack to boot.