I find myself less enamoured of the formal issues which inspired my early work in holography. Gradually, over these past several years, I have become more sensitive to our ever evolving social landscape. In my current state of thinking, I feel overwhelmed by our densely populated and electronically activated work and play environment. We are daily immersed in a liquefied morass of competing signals, symbols and suggestions. In this environment, the hologram is as much a catalyst for evolution as it is a medium and message itself in transition.

I feel less inclined to define meaning in my new work. I feel more inclined to seek answers in our new landscape by collecting and gathering. For me, the code to our civilisation, which we ceaselessly seek to comprehend and understand, lies hidden in the complex mosaic of everyday errata and ephemera about issues such as gender, race, breast cancer, AIDS, Whitewater, digital TV and so on. It is this new territory, with the aid of new media, which I now seek to explore. The work illustrated in this slide is entitled Ephemeral Garden. Employing holograms, photographs and mixed media (much of it found material), it is an assemblage of elements which seeks to unveil the cultural encoding referred to earlier.

Douglas E. Tyler was symposium co-chair and spoke in A Gallery Exodus, Holography in Public Spaces