Ever since Tupac took the stage at Coachella in 2012, holographic material has been slowly making its way into the work of contemporary visual artists and designers. Known for his music videos and a cut and stitched timelapse remix of Alfred Hitchcock’s Rear Window, visual effects artist and experimental filmmaker Jeff Desom uses his own DIY holograms to create what he calls a, “new perspective and a tribute to cinema, accessible to all.”
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Desom’s latest project Holograma is a series of sculptural video installations inspired by early methods of optical theater, or Theatre Optique, a projected image technique developed by French inventor Charles-Émile Reynaud in the late 19th century. In his modern renditions, Desom brings new life to the optical theater while paying homage to Reynaud’s famous moving picture shows such as Pantomimes Lumineuses.Famous scenes from film and television are transported to the 3D realm using what Desom describes as "a simple holographic process based on a semi-transparent screen, mixing the image of an extremely faithfully built model with the characters extracted from the original scene."Desom employs a rotoscoping editing technique commonly used for stop-motion films, where he outlines on-screen characters from television and film, traces their body movements, effectively cropping silhouettes out from a scene, and then converting them into a 3D holographic projection. Desom recreates iconic scenes from film and television by projecting his holographic characters onto a miniature model of the set they were taken from, built by his partner Oli Pesch. Desom and Pesch constructed a set of five boxes in Holograma that feature a selection of recognizable footage, from the Big Lebowski to Twin Peaks.
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