Andrew Pepper
The Creative Holography Index, Monand Press
pepper@monand.demon.co.uk
During the last year the number of holography sites on the WWW has increased rapidly and now includes institutions, private individuals, commercial holography companies, publishers and enthusiasts. Is what they provide useful and are there any major benefits to this system which could not be achieved with more traditional methods of communication?
A review of several holography sites is provided, a case study of the development of one of those sites is given in detail and an extensive reference list of WWW addresses is included.
Keywords: Internet, World Wide Web, Art, Computers, Creative Holography, Publications, Multi Media
The Internet is a computer network made up of many smaller networks all capable of communicating with each other. It started about 25 years ago as ARPAnet, an American Defense Department experiment,(1) and is now made up of government, academic, commercial and private computer networks from around the world : a network of networks. The early uses were for the exchange of research and data electronically. It has since developed into a carrier for news, discussion, data bases, sound, video and interactive multi media services. During 1994/5 the Internet became a popular topic for the world's media. There was hardly a newspaper, magazine or TV programme which did not refer to it and its effect on our society.
The Internet and its services have become visible and popular. Users are now attracted from outside academic circles, to include home users with personal computers who accessed the system via modem and telephone line. Computer enthusiasts were always there but now it is easier for the non-specialist, with little or no computer or electronics knowledge, to get 'on line'. Service Providers (companies who charge you a fee for providing access to the Internet and its services) have become more active and numerous. The opportunity now exists for people to use the Internet from most major cities around the world. The Internet family has grown quickly, now estimated at 37 million users.(2)
Large amounts of information, such as computer software, can be collected using the Internet to access a remote computers and 'down load' files, software or other digital material for use on the local computer.
Anything which can be digitised can be transmitted over the Internet, including sound and vision. As a communications system it is vast, accessible, flexible, global and it works. The Internet is not owned by any one person, company or government,(3) it has no political or geographical borders. Its social borders are limited to people with money who can purchase a computer and the access services they need to connect to the Internet, or to those who do not own the equipment but have access to it either via academic or community suppliers.(4) There are also Cyber cafés where visitors can drink coffee and 'surf' the Internet. Such establishments have been attractive and newsworthy for the media and helped 'sell' the Internet, and the virtual world it supports, to millions.
There are many sections of the Internet designed to achieve particular results for specific users. One area which has grown quickly over the last two years the World Wide Web (WWW). This is a multi-media area which allows the transmission of text, graphics, sound and video using an extremely simple user interface. The WWW was developed at CERN, the European Particle Physics Laboratories.(5) What started life in a scientific research facility has become the most active and attractive multi media section of the Internet. WWW users receive pages of material, text and graphics in colour. Sections of these pages are interactive. Text, for example, can be highlighted (often in blue) to produce a hypertext link. If a user places their cursor on any of this highlighted text and then 'clicks' their mouse, they will be provided with a new page of text or graphics. What is interesting is that this new page of information need not be held in the remote computer to which the user was originally connected. The new page can come from any other computer around the world, which is currently connected.
It is, for example, possible to produce a WWW page, made up of text from a computer in London, one picture stored in a computer in Tokyo and a second picture stored in San Francisco. The software program, or WWW browser,(6) used to access the system, deals with all these connections, collects the individual pieces of information and composes them for the user on their own computer. The system can be completely transparent to users, the result being a page of information which can be viewed on the screen or printed out for later reference.
Because any area of a WWW page can be made to take the user to more (and different) information, the system can be considered interactive. Using only text for this example, a story can be written with several endings which can be selected by the reader. Characters in the story can have background descriptions which can be selected by the reader, should they require further information. References to a text can be hypertext linked to other texts, which are then made available to the reader in full.
If graphics are included, a particular picture can be linked to, for example, a larger version of the same image, a detail of the image, a text description or a completely different WWW site. It is also possible to produce links in the pages to audio and video files, so a picture can become animated or sound can be played back. Again anything that can be digitised can be accessed from WWW pages using these links. In effect, the WWW provides simple 'point and click' access to all of the facilities the Internet offers in one user interface.
The WWW is interesting because the flow of information is not one way, from the remote host computer to the local receiving computer. Feedback can be sent from the user to the host. Recent versions of the WWW browser software offer users the opportunity to fill in forms on screen, with specific details which are then transmitted back to the host computer. This is not revolutionary, it has always been possible to send electronic messages across the Internet. What is exciting is that the feedback can be automatically processed and placed back into the WWW pages to be read by other users. The WWW pages can be constantly updated with new information.
A simple example is the search facility. Using one of the many WWW search pages a word can be typed into the page, this is sent back to the host computer, which searches its data base for all references to it, then returns a new page to the use with the results, often in a matter of seconds. These results will normally be hypertext linked to the full information requested. The page and its contents will be designed and presented automatically for the person who requested the search. Another user, searching for a different word, will receive a different page layout with different content.
There has been interest in providing an accessible, electronic, information service for holography for many years. One of the first attempts was a project developed by Linda Law in the U.S.A.(7) The aim was to construct an online forum so that people could exchange ideas and experiences relating to holography in all its forms. Established in August 1985 at the New York Institute of Technology (NYIT), USA, the project was a conferencing system called Participate. This was a text only system (the WWW had not yet been invented) and was to cover several conference areas including:
This was announced at the Second International Symposium on Display Holography, Lake Forest, USA, in 1985 by Linda Law, and was hosted, a short time later, by NYIT on their computer system. There were several holographers signed onto the system who began using it as a discussion forum, but before it could flourish, a change of policy at NYIT resulted in a halt to the project.. A second attempt by Law, this time in Denver, Colorado, USA, could not proceed due to lack of funding, and as Law acknowledges, a loss of momentum.(8)
Most of what Law wanted to do now exists in different parts of the Internet using different host computers, and distribution networks. This situation has developed due to the reduction in the price of computers, the reduction in the price for connection to the Internet, the increased use of e-mail as a communications device and the massive expansion of the Internet.
Many people working with holography are able to use e-mail. Scientists, researchers and educators have academic access which is free,(9) independent artists can use Service Providers for private access for a small fee. This means that questions and comments can be exchanged between colleagues and members of the holography community. Messages tend to be short, precise and answered quickly.
SPIE started an e-mail service for holography in 1993, aimed at members of the Holography Working Group and other interested parties. This is a listserver which allows electronic messages to be sent to a computer server owned by SPIE and then redirected, automatically, to all 'subscribers' to the system.
Response to the service has been very good and is a regular source of information for its users. The SPIE provides other specialist listservers for a variety of interest groups.(10) The advantage of this service is that it is automatic. I can send one message and it will be distributed to all members of the server. The disadvantage is that 'junk' mail is also easy to send to many people - mail which has little or nothing to do with the target group. Complaints against this abuse of the system prompted SPIE to provide human intervention, meaning that messages sent to the system are read by a human before further, automatic, distribution. This is seen by SPIE as a way of filtering out the 'junk', rather than censoring the mail.
The Holography listserver has been a success. "The Internet and e-mail have provided a means of global communication on a massive scale. When a student in the UK posted a message asking a question from the group regarding a subject for a term paper he was working on, he was inundated with responses. That's the beauty of the listserver. People helping others within the same technological interest to grow and expand the field."(11)
The multi media aspects of the WWW have made it one of the fastest developing areas of the Internet. The ease of use for the end user and provider, together with facilities offered: interactivity, text, photos, video and sound make it attractive, impressive and useful.
Holography has found a home on the WWW. There are now several holography sites, with the numbers increasing every few weeks. Some indication of the rapid increase in this area can be seen by carrying out a search request using one of the WWW search services. On 31st May 1995 the WebCrawler search service(12) was asked to locate all WWW sites showing the word 'holography' and returned a list of 70 references(13). On 15th January 1996, the request was repeated by the author of this paper and returned a result of 123 references. Four days later this had increased by a further 14 references. These sites are various, ranging from dedicated holography sites, through Resumes/CVs for individuals to research organisations, commercial marketing companies and 'holo' enthusiasts.
The increase in results of this search using WebCrawler (one of the most popular WWW search sites), is significant but not conclusive. Search sites and search engines on the WWW are not universal. They find references to information in their data banks alone, not the WWW as a whole. Searching for 'holography' on another site, with another data bank will return different results. For example, if we repeat the search experiment with the Lycos search engine, part of the Carnegie Mellon University, USA (14), asking for all references to 'holography', on January 11th 1996, it returned a result of 976 documents, on January 23rd it reported 1018 documents. The advantage with Lycos over WebCrawler is that it will also provide a short description for each of these documents which helps the researcher assess whether it is worth connecting to any particular site for further exploration. It is clear from these results alone that expansion in this area is rapid.
One of the first sites to offer a regularly updated series of holography pages was HoloCom(15) which started its WWW server at the beginning of 1995. It now receives about 12,000 'visitors' a day, giving some indication of the interest generated in the service. Not all of these 'visitors' are for the holography pages, but if only a fraction want holography, this still means that there are a great many people looking and this is only one of many WWW sites.
It is possible, for example, to visit the 'Internet Museum of Holography'(16) and look round their gallery spaces and shop. There is also the 'Holos Gallery Online'(17) with featured artists and their work. Gary Zellerbach, who founded the original, physical, Holos Gallery in San Francisco also put this virtual gallery together and commented, "I saw myself getting out of the holography business, however, after a 15 year involvement, I hated to cut myself off completely. I started out in 1978 with a love for holographic art but ended up selling mostly holo-junk in the later years. Holos Gallery Online was coming full circle for me, a way to once again display holographic art to the world (and with no need to clutter up my presentation with less expensive holograms just to pay the bills)."(18) Or visit the exhibition of Russian Art Holograms which was on show in the Canadian 'Royal Holographic Art Gallery'.(19)
The MIT Museum which now has a huge collection of holograms (purchased from the Museum of Holography In New York), also has a presence on the WWW with images and information about its collections.(20) These virtual Museums and Galleries, together with their virtual shops, are growing. It is cheaper and quicker to put together a virtual Museum than to build a physical one. But why do it? One comment came from Frank DeFreitas of the Internet Museum of Holography who commented, "After the Museum of Holography in New York closed, I felt there was a void in holography that needed to be filled. Hence the Internet Museum of Holography. As time goes on it will function just as a museum in the 'real world', providing a source of information about the history as well as the future of the field of holography, along with exhibits and educational programs."(21)
There are not many publications dedicated to holography but they are on the Internet. The Holo-Gram, a newsletter established in 1983, went electronic in October 1995 with its first WWW issue. There you can learn about this SPIE symposium, the first virtual holography classroom, the forthcoming 6th International Symposium at Lake Forest, plus a profile of someone new to holography, and an exhibition of the Jonathan Ross holography collection, which took place in England. If the computer system and peripherals (scanners and storage) are already available, then this form of publication is faster and cheaper than printing ink onto paper and mailing it to subscribers. It also means that information can be updated very quickly.
Ian Lancaster, editor of Holography News, the well known industry news letter, uses a different strategy. It is possible to obtain information about Holography News (22) on the WWW, with highlights of articles featured previously and news items, but the complete texts are not there This is a way of selling subscriptions to the full paper publication by providing WWW users with a 'taster' of the quality and quantity of information they can expect to find there. He is receiving an average of 1,000 visitors to the Holography News home page each week. About 20% look at headlines, highlights and specific stories while 1% go to the subscription information. It still remains to be seen if this is an effective way of gaining new subscribers, Lancaster describes the selling of new subscriptions of the paper publication via the WWW as "very low".(23)
The Creative Holography Index,(24) edited by the author of this paper, was first published, on paper, at the end of 1992. It catalogues the work of artists using holography and commissions critical essays on the subject. It was launched on the WWW in November 1995 as Search The Light, and forms the basis for the following case study.
The Creative Holography Index is the only international catalogue for creative holography and is collected by artists, curators, gallery and museum directors, media managers, libraries and the general public world- wide. It currently weighs over two kilos. The cost of printing, in colour, and distributing the Index is immense. It is also difficult and expensive to update. Simply updating the artist address list for the last 1995 issue took over 6 months (people are slow to respond) and cost a considerable amount of money.
As the Index is designed using desk top publishing systems, all the information, including its data base, is digital. The transfer of this information into WWW pages is quick and easy, so it was decided to experiment with an online version of the publication. This experiment was made possible with support form HoloCom, who provided server space to host the site, and Monand Press who did the page make up and simple programming of the WWW pages.
The advantages of an online version are considerable. The pages can be updated quickly and without great expense. When a new artist is featured in Search the Light, they are asked to send their updated biography and exhibition list to the Index electronically, where it is edited and placed directly into their electronic pages.
Each page is produced on Macintosh computers in Europe. Scanned colour images or graphic titles, which are produced using Adobe Photoshop, are combined with text information, which is taken from the original Quark Express pages used to produce and print the paper Index, and pasted into an HTML editor. The page is laid out, has hypertext links for text and graphics included and is then sent to the HoloCom server in Houston, Texas, USA, via File Transfer Protocol (FTP) over the Internet, where it is instantly accessible to WWW users.
This HoloCom computer is a 120 rack mounted purpose built configuration with two gigabytes of hard disc storage, 64 megabytes of Random Access memory running Berkeley software, Unix system with Pearl 5. The connection from the computer to the Internet is made using a 'TI' link directly into the network, thus providing very fast access times for users wanting to connect to the WWW sites stored in the machine.
The WWW is a design disaster! It is at the stage now that computer desk top publishing (DTI) found itself at the beginning. When DTI programmes became available, they provided people using a computer with the opportunity to produce printed publications quickly and without professional knowledge of the printing or design industry. Very few of these computer users were designers or had any idea about design problems. Thousands of publications were produced, which were design disasters. The situation has now settled down: designers have learned to use DTI and people with no idea about professional design have learnt to employ designers who have the skills.
The WWW is currently in the early stages. Anyone with a computer and the right software can produce their own 'home page' and make it available on the Internet. This is both positive and negative. On the positive side there is no one to ask for permission(25) and anyone can put anything they wish onto the network - there is no censorship and no minimal design requirement. On the negative side this means that there are thousands of people who know nothing about layout, design, content, marketing, editing and related subjects who are now electronic publishers.
This does not mean that there are not WWW sites with stunning graphics, excellent editorial ethics and totally professional output.
The WWW is peculiar in that it is so flexible. If an agency designs their pages ready to go out on the WWW, there is absolutely no guarantee that the layout they have produced will be seen by any of the end users in the way it was intended.. The layout of the page at the user's end is dependent on which typeface their browser is programmed to display the type of browser being used, the size of their screen and their type of system (pages look different on a Silicon Graphics machine than on a Macintosh). Developments are so rapid now that changes to the systems can take place in a few weeks making old versions of software obsolete (or at least old fashioned). The situation will settle down and there is already software available to allow the accurate transmission and reception of WWW pages being developed. One positive aspect to this rapid changing of standards is that almost all new software released is available for down loading into the user's computer via the WWW and Internet. the handbooks are also online and programming is completely accessible. It is possible to request the source programming of any WWW page and see how it has been put together. Clever programming of pages and new ideas therefore spread rapidly.
There are many WWW sites which are full of large graphic images. These take a long time to load into the user's computer once a WWW page is requested. This time delay is a problem and frustrates many users. It was felt that although colour graphics are an essential part of the WWW, they should be used with caution in the Search The Light site. Graphic images for page title design within the page are kept small. The largest graphic images are the pictures of the artists' holograms. It was felt that if people are visiting a site dedicated to the art of holography, they would be willing to wait for the down loading of the images of artists' holograms and this would not be seen as a disadvantage. The location of these large images has also been considered. If a user requests a featured artist page, they will normally receive an introduction text first, at the top of the page, followed by details of the hologram featured. While they are reading this, the large graphic image is being loaded in the background and much further down the page (off screen) so that the user is not aware of the time taken to load it. By the time they have finished reading the text, they can scroll their computer screen to look at the colour image, which is fully loaded. This gives the impression that although the site has some beautiful images, it remains fast to down load, whereas, in fact, it loads at the same rate as other sites. The Search The Light site is very 'clean' and simple. It has received many comments for this combination of simplicity and detailed information, not only from graphic designers, but artists and scientists, researchers and the general public.
The WWW and Internet are full of places to buy things. There is a great deal of interest in using the Internet to transact business, with credit card companies exploring the possibilities of using the network as well as completely electronic cash services which are being developed. People already buy things on the Internet, estimated, last year, at 14% of users.(26)
One of the subsidiary aims of the Search The Light site was to help sell the paper product on which it is based and so fund the cost of the electronic version. In the three months that it has been available there has not been a single sale. Either the market is too small for the product, the product is too expensive, or the selling aspect of Search The Light is so subliminal that users do not realize they can purchase something. There is, however, an 'order' button on almost every page so it is difficult to avoid.
Other holography sites have been more successful. Ken Harris of HoloCom has sold products and services, Frank DeFreitas has reduced his direct (paper) marketing activities to concentrate on electronic services and has sold holograms, services and arranged speaking engagements. Martin Berson of Hypermedia Technologies(27), a WWW site including many holography pages, has sold server space and the companies who use the site have reported sales from their presence there.
Simon Edhouse of Australian Holographics has seen no tangible results in their first six months of WWW operation but is optimistic, "it surely represents the first incarnation of the future of global communications. We are in a fairly remote location (in Australia) so there is an incentive to eradicate the tyranny of distance using the wide tentacles of the Web....It is a platform where everyone is looking for new things. We offer a new product so this is the perfect vehicle.(28)
More and more people working with holography are being attracted to the benefits of placing information about themselves on the WWW. During 1996 a new service will start, based in Europe. HoloNet is a project being developed by Urs Fries(29) which will gather and transmit vast amounts of information about many aspects of holography with particular emphasis on the arts. In the original proposal(30) it aims to direct it's services at:
This will be a large system which will also allow artists to enter information about themselves, making it instantly available to other users. Research and collection of material and information for the HoloNet is well advanced. The GRAM archive project(31) has already discussed the possibility of providing data for the HoloNet data base, as has the Creative Holography Index, the International Catalogue for Holography. Other providers are expected to allow their data to be stored there as the project develops. The main aim of HoloNet is to provide a powerful search engine to access its data base of text and images. This means that users can type in to the search page a word, or collection of words, and be provided with search results which will take them to specific pages or sites. Because of the nature of the WWW and its hypertext system this means that users will be directed not only to information held on HoloNet, but to other holography sites on the Internet. The HoloNet could provide a global 'clearing house' for holography, while allowing scientists, research facilities, commercial producers, manufacturers, artists and enthusiasts to maintain their own presence on the WWW. HoloNet will be set up as a not for profit project and be independent from any company, academic facility, artist, or scientific grouping. It will, by nature of its size and complexity, probably need to be housed in an institution which can help maintain the technical requirements needed.
Although the GRAM project will collaborate with HoloNet, they also intend to produce their own WWW site which will include information about holography, in French, together with data and images on other media within the Media Arts. GRAM has been collecting information, interviews and images for several years and their appearance on the WWW will provide an exceptional resource on the subject.
Holography on the Internet and particularly the WWW is growing rapidly. There are sites which provide a high quality of information and comment, there are also those which are less successful. What is difficult at the moment is to find the right information. It is obviously not possible to request a WWW search, receive over 900 references and then look at all of them, the cost in time is prohibitive and the cost in telephone connections (for non-academic users) is too high, the system is, however, becoming more streamlined. It is now possible to search multiple data bases on the WWW with a single request. Search engines are becoming more and more flexible, to narrow the search criteria to specific requests and with the development of intelligent agents (software programs which search the Internet for you and come back with the results), the Internet will become more usable.
The Internet will also become a victim of its own success. As more and more people use the network, it becomes slower to transfer the information, which is particularly irritating for WWW users waiting for their megabytes of colour graphic or video to be down loaded. In Europe, for example, it is often difficult to connect to American based WWW servers after lunch time (local time) because America is waking up and logging onto the network placing more traffic into the system. Solutions will arrive in the form of faster connections from server to Internet and high capacity transmission lines within the Internet, but it appears it will get slower before it gets faster.
Holography on the Internet is active and impressive. The networks and systems currently available can help the researcher locate the information he or she needs quickly as well as often putting them in direct contact with the author of papers or the maker of holograms. This can only help in the understanding of the holographic media and process and the further dissemination of information about it. What this means is that information is, perhaps, no longer power, the power will now rest in what an individual does with that information and how they interpret it. We can all have the information if we want it.
I would like to thank Ken Harris at HoloCom for providing support for the Search The Light WWW experiment, Urs Fries for making his research documents available and all the people working with holography and the WWW who answered my questions and gave their opinion.
World Wide Web sites referred to in this paper
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