In conjunction with the Museum-wide summer exhibition “Ghosts in the Machine,” the New Museum will present “Pictures from the Moon” in the Lobby Gallery, which will feature a focused selection of holograms from the 1960s to the present by several leading, contemporary artists. The 1960s ushered in new technologies and new frontiers for image production. The development of laser technology in 1962 enabled the creation of holograms that displayed three-dimensional images on a two-dimensional surface. Artists were drawn to holography,... Read more

In conjunction with the Museum-wide summer exhibition “Ghosts in the Machine,” the New Museum will present “Pictures from the Moon” in the Lobby Gallery, which will feature a focused selection of holograms from the 1960s to the present by several leading, contemporary artists. The 1960s ushered in new technologies and new frontiers for image production. The development of laser technology in 1962 enabled the creation of holograms that displayed three-dimensional images on a two-dimensional surface. Artists were drawn to holography, hailed as a medium of the future that turned space inside out, for its spatial, volumetric, and sequential qualities, and to the creative possibilities it offered in contrast to photography, film, and early video. “Pictures from the Moon”—its title inspired by photographs of earth taken by astronauts on the first mission to the moon that also expanded our way of seeing—celebrates an alternative history of virtually unknown images by artists experimenting on the edge of visual technolo