A hologram, in the strict sense, is light remembered by glass. Many of the first ones were recorded on glass plates coated with a light-sensitive emulsion: an interference pattern, frozen in the plate and brought back to life when another beam strikes it. It needs a surface and a background. The floating figures of concerts and advertising are usually something humbler, an heir of the Victorian stage trick called Pepper’s ghost, a reflection thrown onto a translucent screen. Magic of a kind, though not yet the kind we dream of.
Light that hangs in open air, with no screen and no curtain of mist, still belongs to the laboratory. Yet the first rays of that future have arrived.
In 2018 a team at Brigham Young University described, in Nature, the Optical Trap Display. Lasers hold a single particle of cellulose in the air and move it so fast, while red, green and blue lasers light it, that the eye sees a drawing in empty space: a tiny sculpture of light, visible from almost every side. A Japanese group published another approach in 2016, writing glowing points of plasma into the air with femtosecond laser pulses, in a space the size of a sugar cube. In 2025 researchers at the Public University of Navarra presented volumetric images floating in mid-air that a hand can touch. All of it is real, all of it is small, and all of it still lives in laboratories.
The researchers call these devices volumetric displays, and the distinction is a fair one. I keep the older word for them, because it has carried the dream of light standing in space for decades, and because it holds a bridge I care about. Medieval glaziers worked with light that passes through glass and fills a cathedral with color. Holographers write light into glass and call it back. Volumetric displays release it into the air. It is one line of descent, running from the stained-glass window through the glass plate to the sculpture of light, and hologram is the word that lets the glass of the past and the art of the future stand in one sentence.
This is not yet the age of Blade Runner. I am convinced that it is coming.
GlassStories.art was inspired by light from the beginning: its refraction in glass, its capture in structure, a story told through cracks and flares. What matters most to me is its release. Every work in the collection is built in layers, image, word, sound and movement, and layers are what a volume is made of. The digital card of each package, the Hologlass, already holds a work suspended in layers of digital glass. When light no longer needs a carrier, I intend to be ready.
I make the images for my stories with AI tools, and I want them to look like artifacts from the future, memories from places where physics bowed to beauty. One day these works will leave the screens and the prints, illuminate the air and breathe with light.
I am the Mysterious Creator, and I wait for the day when light no longer needs a physical carrier.
Pure form.
Pure story.
Art with nothing left in the way.