When Art and Physics Ask the Same Questions
Between 1976 and 1982, I was making holographic shadowgrams — asking questions about how light encodes space, how observers complete what they see, how consciousness encounters invisible structure. Then in 1993, Gerard 't Hooft proposed something called the holography principle. Leonard Susskind formalized it in 1995: all the information in a three-dimensional volume can be encoded on its two-dimensional boundary.
I had made my work before I knew any of this existed. When you look at what I was exploring and what the physicists formalized, they are asking the same questions. Different tools, same territory. This volume has two essays about that convergence. Choose your entry point below, or read both in sequence.
You know, sometimes you start out trying to make art, and you end up bumping into the universe. That's more or less what happened to me.
Back in the late 1970s, I was fiddling with light — bending it, bouncing it, interfering with it — trying to make images that weren't there. Not illusions, exactly, but something stranger: shadows with depth, surfaces that whispered of space. I called this practice Holographism, though I didn't know at the time that physicists would later come up with something eerily similar and call it the Holography Principle.
Now, I'm not saying I predicted quantum gravity. That would be silly. But I do think there's something interesting going on when two very different kinds of inquiry — art and physics — start asking the same kinds of questions. What is space? What is presence? Can information live on a surface and still describe a volume? And what happens when you try to look at it?
So this isn't a physics lecture, and it's not an art manifesto either. It's more like a guided tour through a strange museum where the exhibits are metaphors, and the walls are made of light.
Let's start with a weird idea from physics. Suppose you have a box — a cube of space. You might think that the amount of information you can stuff into that box depends on its volume. More space, more stuff, right?
Wrong.
Turns out, if you take a black hole and ask how much entropy it has — entropy being a fancy word for how much information is hidden inside — the answer doesn't scale with volume. It scales with surface area. Just the outer shell. Like the skin of an orange telling you everything about the juice inside.
This is the holography principle. It says that physics inside a region of space can be fully described by information on its boundary. It's as if the universe is a kind of cosmic hologram — three dimensions emerging from two.
Now, in my art, I didn't have equations or string theory. I had holographic plates. But they did something similar. A flat surface encoded a whole volume. Not by storing a picture, but by interfering with light in such a way that depth emerged when you looked at it just right.
So, here's the metaphor: the holographic plate is like the boundary of space. It doesn't contain the object — it contains the instructions for how the object appears. And the viewer, by moving and observing, decodes those instructions. The object isn't "in" the plate. It's in interaction.
Imagine you're looking at a flat plate — just a surface, nothing fancy. But then, as you move, something strange happens. Depth appears. Space unfolds. It's like the surface is whispering secrets about a world that isn't really there.
That's what I tried to do in a work called Imaginary Plane. The name's a bit of a pun — on the complex plane, yes, but also on the idea that what we see might not be "real" in the usual sense. The depth isn't in the plate. It's in the light. Or maybe in the way your brain interprets the light.
Physicists have their own version of this trick. In something called AdS/CFT correspondence, they say that gravity in a bulk space can be described entirely by stuff happening on the boundary. It's like the whole drama of spacetime is encoded on the edges.
The holographic plate is like that boundary. It doesn't contain the object — it contains the instructions. And you, the observer, decode those instructions by moving, by looking, and by engaging. The object isn't "in" the plate. It's in interaction.
Let me tell you something weird about holograms. There's nothing there. No object, no mass, no volume. Just light. And yet, when you look at it, you see something. A shape. A presence.
This is what I mean by emergence. The thing you see isn't built from stuff. It's built from relationships — between light waves, between angles, and between you and the surface.
Now, physicists have a similar idea. Some of them think spacetime itself might be emergent — not a fundamental thing, but something that arises from deeper quantum relationships. It's like the universe is playing a holographic trick on us.
In my art, I try to stage that trick. I build structures that don't exist — except when you look at them. The presence is conditional. It's relational. It's not "there" unless you're part of it.
Here's a fun experiment: take one of my installations and stand still. You'll see one thing. Now move. You'll see something else. The artwork changes — not because it's changing, but because you are.
This is what I call participatory perception. The viewer isn't passive. They're part of the system. They complete the work.
Physics has its own version of this. In quantum mechanics, the observer plays a role in determining outcomes. In relativity, what you see depends on where you are and how fast you're moving. The universe isn't fixed. It's relational.
My art becomes a metaphor for that. No single viewpoint reveals the whole. Meaning emerges through movement, through multiplicity, through participation.
Let's talk about perspective. Classical art loves vanishing points. Renaissance painters used them to organize space — foreground, background, and hierarchy.
But I wasn't interested in hierarchy. I wanted equality. So, I used axonometric projection — a geometry without a vanishing point, where parallel lines in a 3D object remain parallel.
It's a bit like how physicists use Penrose diagrams or conformal maps. They compress space, preserve relationships, and avoid bias in any direction.
In my piece Axonometric Ascent, I rejected the rules of classical perspective. I built a space where everything exists in dynamic relation. No center. No edge. Just structure. It's not physics, but it's a metaphor — a way of thinking about space as something constructed, not given.
In Artifacts from Descartes' Dreams, I scattered fragments across a landmass. Each one seemed incomplete. But together, they formed a pattern — a constellation of meaning.
This is what I call relational encoding. The significance isn't in the parts. It's in relationships.
Now, quantum mechanics has a concept called nonlocality. Entangled particles affect each other instantly, no matter how far apart they are. Einstein called it "spooky action at a distance," but it's real.
My installation becomes a metaphor for that. Meaning isn't local. It's distributed. It emerges from connections, not positions.
Time is a slippery thing. We think of it as flowing — past, present, future. But what if time is more like space? What if it's something you move through?
In my installations, I try to spatialize time. I layer images and patterns so that different positions reveal different temporal phases. The viewer's movement becomes a kind of time travel.
Some physicists think time might not be fundamental. It might emerge from changes in spatial relationships. Again, I'm not doing physics. But I'm staging a metaphor. The artwork holds multiple temporal states. You choose which one to see. It's a kind of temporal superposition — an experiential analog to quantum ideas.
Holography is all about encoding. You take a three-dimensional scene and store it in a two-dimensional pattern. Each part of the plate contains information about the whole.
That's a bit like quantum entanglement. Particles share information in ways that defy classical logic. The whole is encoded in the parts.
In my holograms, the interference fringes aren't images. They're instructions. They reveal space only when illuminated correctly. It's a metaphor for how information might be structured in the universe. Presence becomes a function of decoding. Interaction becomes the key.
Let's talk about perception. In holography, nothing appears unless you look at it the right way. The viewer completes the work. This is phenomenology — the study of how things appear. It's not about objects. It's about experience.
Physics is starting to grapple with this too. In quantum mechanics, observation affects reality. In information theory, the observer matters.
My installations make this explicit. Without the right angle, the encoded information stays hidden. The viewer isn't just watching. They're participating.
Art and physics are different languages. One speaks in equations. The other in experience. But sometimes, they ask the same questions. What is space? What is presence? How does information become reality?
My practice — Holographism — isn't physics. But it's a way of thinking. A way of staging metaphors that illuminate abstract ideas. And maybe the relationship between art and physics is itself holographic. Each encodes insights about the other. Meaning emerges through interaction.
Rick Silberman · Manhattan · 2025
Conceptual Art Meets Quantum Physics · Rick Silberman · Former Visiting Lecturer in Physics, Brown University
Between 1976 and 1982, I created holographic installations that explored how surfaces encode volumes, how observers complete systems, and how meaning emerges from relational structures. These works were not inspired by physics — I knew nothing of black hole entropy or string theory at the time. They were investigations into light, perception, and space pursued through visual means.
More than a decade later, Gerard 't Hooft (1993) and Leonard Susskind (1995) formalized what became known as the holography principle: all information in a three-dimensional volume can be encoded on its two-dimensional boundary. The parallels between my work and this physics are not only metaphorical but structural. This essay examines eight specific correspondences and argues that when art and science ask the same fundamental questions, they can arrive at the same answers through entirely different methods. The chronology proves this convergence is real.
The holography principle, introduced by Gerard 't Hooft and developed further by Leonard Susskind, suggests that all the information contained within a three-dimensional volume can be encoded on its two-dimensional boundary. This radical idea has found support in string theory and black hole thermodynamics. In particular, the behavior of black hole entropy, which scales with the surface area rather than the volume, provides compelling physical evidence for the plausibility of holographic encoding.
Some physicists have proposed extending the holography principle to cosmic scales — what has been termed Celestial Holography. This speculative framework posits that the entire observable universe, including distant stars and the cosmic microwave background, may serve as a holographic surface encoding the deep structure of spacetime. If true, this implies that our experience of depth, distance, and cosmological structure is an emergent phenomenon derived from a distant, possibly two-dimensional informational boundary.
As an artist working in holography, I find this proposition deeply resonant with my visual philosophy. My installations do not represent objects in space. Instead, they stage perceptual events that unfold through layered interference and structured light. Viewers are not looking at objects, but at the conditions under which objects appear. In this sense, the gallery wall becomes analogous to the celestial sphere. It encodes a visual field whose depth and coherence are emergent properties, constructed by the observer's interaction with the boundary surface.
This essay does not attempt to teach the holography principle — physicists have done that work rigorously. What I offer instead is evidence that artistic inquiry can reach the same structural insights through perceptual investigation. The eight sections that follow demonstrate specific correspondences between my practice (1976–1982) and theoretical physics (1990s–present). The question is not whether art illustrates physics, but whether both disciplines, pursuing the same questions through different tools, can converge on the same truths.
In physics, the idea that three-dimensional phenomena can emerge from a two-dimensional surface is central to the holography principle. This concept is perhaps most rigorously formulated in the AdS/CFT correspondence, where the behavior of gravity in a bulk anti-de Sitter space is encoded by a conformal field theory on its boundary.
In my piece Imaginary Plane (1979), a deliberate pun on the mathematical construct known as the complex plane, I sought to stage a visual event where depth and volume emerge not from physical extension, but from light behavior manipulated across a carefully prepared plane. The term "imaginary" in this context is not a dismissal of reality, but a nod to the idea that what we see is not always bound to material substrate. The plane serves as a site where space becomes negotiable, conditional on illumination and perspective. When activated, the flatness of the plate collapses, and what appears is a space that is real in perception, though absent in substance.
Just as a hologram stores volumetric information on a surface by way of interference patterns, theoretical physics suggests that the universe itself may operate on similar principles, with surface dynamics encoding the full behavior of a volumetric region. The observer in my holograms enacts this decoding process. Their movement, their gaze, their relation to light and angle determine what is "there." The work does not exist in totality except through interaction, echoing the idea that physical information in a quantum gravitational system is observer-relative and encoded relationally.
The concept of presence without substance is central to both holography and the emerging philosophical underpinnings of quantum gravity. A hologram generates the perception of a three-dimensional object, yet there is no object in the traditional sense. There is only light, patterned and projected, interacting with the eye and brain in such a way that a coherent spatial illusion is formed.
This experience parallels the way many physicists now conceptualize the nature of spacetime itself. Rather than being a fundamental substance, spacetime may be an emergent phenomenon arising from entangled quantum states. Gravity, likewise, might not be a force in the traditional sense, but a thermodynamic or informational effect emerging from deeper laws that govern quantum entanglement.
My artworks do not rely on mass, solidity, or classical spatial occupancy. They rely on structured absence. The presence that the viewer encounters is constructed through relational geometry, interference, and shifting perspective. The hologram is not a lesser substitute for a real object. It is a statement that presence itself is conditional, distributed, and encoded.
Modern physics recognizes that reality is not absolute but observer-dependent. In quantum mechanics, the act of measurement alters the system. In relativity, simultaneity is not universal but relative to the observer's frame of reference.
Holographism embraces this deeply. My installations are never the same twice. A viewer standing still sees one configuration, while a viewer in motion sees another. The artwork is not fixed. It is enacted. It becomes a co-produced event between object and observer. No single perspective reveals the whole. Instead, meaning emerges through motion, multiplicity, and participation.
This reflects the logic of quantum complementarity and cosmological horizon physics. In black hole thermodynamics, what is inside or outside the event horizon depends on where the observer is. Similarly, in my holograms, what is visible or invisible depends on where the viewer stands. Each angle reveals and conceals in equal measure. Thus, observer-dependence is not a limitation. It is a structure. It is how information is accessed and transformed.
Axonometric projection is a form of representation that maintains scale and proportion without conforming to classical perspective. Unlike linear perspective, which organizes space through a vanishing point and hierarchical depth, axonometric projection has no vanishing point, so parallel lines in a 3D object remain parallel. This technique was central to my piece Axonometric Ascent (1979), where I rejected the rules of Renaissance optics in favor of a geometry that gives equal priority to all axes.
In theoretical physics, particularly in the study of Penrose diagrams and conformal mappings, similar representational strategies are employed to visualize the structure of spacetime. These diagrams compress infinite or curved geometries into manageable forms that preserve causal structure and symmetry. Axonometric projection is more than a visual trick. It is a philosophical tool. It resists favoring any one direction, just as the universe may not favor any one frame of reference.
Nonlocality is one of the most counterintuitive but empirically verified aspects of quantum theory. Entangled particles, no matter how far apart, influence each other's states in ways that cannot be explained by signals traveling through space. This suggests that the fundamental structure of reality may be relational, not locational.
In Artifacts from Descartes' Dreams (1982), I positioned holographic fragments across a wide physical space. Alone, they appeared arbitrary, even random. But taken as a set, they pointed toward an invisible convergence. The meaning of each part only emerged in relation to the others. This echoed the way in which spacetime might be emergent from a network of informational correlations rather than intrinsic distances.
The concept of duality is central not only to art but to theoretical physics. In my holographic installations, I use overlay, reflection, and polarity to explore how light constructs a layered reality. Positive and negative spaces coexist. What appears to be surface becomes void, and what seems absent suddenly asserts itself.
This formal play resonates deeply with dualities in physics, such as particle-wave duality, gauge-gravity duality, and the dualities seen in the AdS/CFT correspondence. In each case, the same phenomenon admits two or more complete but distinct descriptions. These are not contradictions but complements. They reveal that truth is not singular.
Time is often treated as a linear, irreversible sequence, distinct from space in both experience and representation. However, in both contemporary physics and my own practice, this division becomes blurred. In loop quantum gravity, for example, time may not exist as a fundamental variable. Instead, what we perceive as temporal flow arises from changes in spatial configurations or from entangled states evolving in a relational network.
In my installations, I aim to spatialize time. Rather than presenting a single frame or moment, I layer images and interference patterns to create a structure that viewers must move through. Each step or change in position reveals a new temporal slice, a new phase of the work. Time is no longer separate from space. It is embedded in the geometry of perception.
Holography works by encoding three-dimensional information into a two-dimensional interference pattern. This encoding is non-local. Each portion of the holographic plate contains information about the entire scene. This principle finds a striking parallel in quantum mechanics, where entangled particles share information across distance in ways that defy classical intuition.
Quantum information theorists now propose that the very fabric of spacetime may arise from the entanglement entropy between quantum states on a boundary surface. In this view, geometry and gravity are not primary. They are emergent properties of information. This is the core insight of the holography principle and its application to theories of quantum gravity.
My work with holography provides a visual and phenomenological analogue to these abstract ideas. The interference fringes on my plates are not images. They are encodings — wavefront collisions that store relational information. When light illuminates them correctly, space reappears. This process parallels how physics now understands the emergence of spatial geometry from quantum informational structure.
This convergence is significant because it suggests something profound about the nature of inquiry itself. Visual thinking and mathematical thinking, when directed at fundamental questions about space, time, and information, can arrive at identical structural insights. My work from 1976 to 1982 embodies principles that physics would formalize in the 1990s — not because I predicted physics, but because we were asking the same questions. The medium differs. The answers align.
Through decades of artistic inquiry, I have come to understand holography not simply as a technique, but as a philosophy. It provides a language for space, time, and presence that resonates with some of the most profound developments in theoretical physics. From the holography principle to quantum entanglement, from observer-dependence to the emergence of spacetime, the parallels between my work and modern physics are not coincidental. They reflect a shared inquiry into the nature of reality.
Holographism offers artists and physicists a new way to conceptualize abstract ideas. It grounds difficult theories in sensory experience. It creates spaces where emergence, duality, and nonlocality are not only imaginable but perceptible. The goal is not to illustrate physics, but to offer it a mirror — one shaped not by numbers, but by light, shadow, and relation.
As we continue to explore the boundaries of knowledge, both artists and physicists must learn to see anew. For in the patterns of interference, in the voids made visible, we may yet discover not only the structure of the universe, but the conditions of our seeing it at all.
Rick Silberman · 2025