Holographic Thought. 
Igor Ganikowskij, 2007

2. Models of thought. The truth is multidimensional.

We all live in a rapidly changing world, and indeed, the rate of change is prodigious. The formerly fantastic and unbelievable becomes the commonplace everyday before our very eyes. People remake themselves both outwardly (plastic surgery) and inwardly (organ transplants, brain chip implants that give sight to the blind, hearing to the deaf). Humanity tries to master completely new technologies, cloning techniques, genetic engineering… and finally strives to create artificial intelligence, and more than this – super intelligence. In the same manner, each person vies with the other to articulate a new way of thinking while having very little understanding of what might constitute that new thought process and where it might ultimately lead us. That is why I would like to examine my most recent three-dimensional works in this essay, and via the vision engendered by the process of thought. Moreover, as I already wrote sometime before, I consider cognition to be one of the most important goals of art, as it is for science, with the difference being that art privileges the intuitive whereas science privileges the intellectual. And so, in my opinion, the correlation between these two methods of cognition will only deepen with time, and possibly, with time, they will merge together into a new syncretism, as it once was in times past…

But now, scientific thought has come dead up against paradoxes with which our reason poorly grapples: we cannot precisely say whether an electron is a particle or a wave or both simultaneously; in different systems, it turns out that time doesn’t flow identically; there are curves in space that change many of its laws… We more and more handle that which we cannot represent.

The conclusion is that our consciousness is not ideal and is severely limited. On the one hand, it can go beyond the limits of the three-dimensional world. On the other, it cannot scan and comprehend a few pictures or thoughts at once, and receives, in its total experience, only incomplete, and that means distorted, information. Our brain is not capable of receiving all information as a whole and at once.

And we should at last realize that we are approaching the time when we will reach the limit of human mental capabilities. Life is squeezing us on all sides and humankind will be forced to react, and first and foremost this means changing our way of thinking. Humans seek truth, but for the time being each has his own truth, whether the truth be of the individual, a people, a government, or a religion. It is hard for us to understand and imagine that there are many truths, that they are always opposing, and that at the same time they are a single truth. That is: truth is multidimensional. Here our perception misfires and we slam up against a wall…

For the perfection of the self and the machine, we must conclude that in order to move forward, in order to master a qualitative leap in the processing of information that is recorded in a different fashion – that is, information that is not linear, not unidimensional, and not sequentially-processed – it would be helpful to understand how the brain of the creator works. But in order to answer this question, the creator himself has to go up a step higher.[1]

3. Three-dimensional painting. Holographic Thought.

Many art critics assign various categorizations to the works I have produced in recent time (again, a mental attempt to apply divisions), calling them objects, sculptures, painting… I prefer to call them three-dimensional painting because I consider each piece to be a separate painterly work, although their combination in space additionally comprises a single greater work. Actually, I fell into a logical trap with this work: I began to write texts in order to attempt to explain various aspects of my works, but in order to understand my texts, it was imperative I refer back to my works, since it was exactly the living works that elicit the feeling that it is so hard to convey in words.

I began this series with a simple work that was a continuation of my sculptures and that represented a plane on which another plane is perpendicularly situated, along the center (you can see this in the catalogue of my personal exhibits, Villa Zanders, Felix Nussbaum House, Silkeborg Museum, pages 46-57; the catalogue of my exhibits, Old Synagogue Meschede, Corine Maman Museum, Jerusalem Artist’s House, pages 46, 47). This simple construction likewise somewhat reminds one of an open book, with one of its turning pages seemingly frozen upright in the vertical position.

All is elementarily simple, but in point of fact, the largest truths are usually concealed in the simplest things. Truths inhabit the simple in a hidden, twisted way and are not immediately visible or understood. It takes concentration.  In this installation I attempted to show how our thought works and I tried to give a sense of how it can work in a qualitatively different way. Let’s examine three possible methods of viewing this work.

The first, typical for human reason: someone looks from the left side first and actually sees[2] (sees can be substituted with hears, thinks…) a specific picture. He is 100% sure of this. Another looks at this same work from the right side first and is just as sure in his rectitude, although he and the first person often see opposing things. But they are looking at the same object! Here we have the source of all human discord, on all levels, starting with the family, the generation, and ending with worldwide skirmishes.  Unfortunately, too often humans demonstrate their pig-headedness, their desire to see things only from their own side.

We then arrive, or rather, are led to the second method: we begin to accept the opinion of the other side, in our case, to walk around the painting, and so actually changing for example the left for the right. Now the viewer who first saw the picture from the left side will have that first impression diminish and, as it does, new information appears about the right side of the picture, which, in its turn, will grow, further diminishing the left side…[3] This is the contemporary version of new thought, and until we can fully master it, we cannot progress to the third model.

The third method of thought can only be felt. Now we have no opportunity, even using our newest technologies, to represent this realistically. Attentively passing the eye over my three-dimensional work while circumambulating it several times, it is possible at a certain moment “to see” all parts independently and the entire work as a whole. This state, like a camera flash of the fantastic, is the revelation of new world. Many people have succeeded in feeling this and they have described this sensation as a complete merging with the world. They have felt they simultaneously encapsulate the entire world and are but a part of it. Contemporary television affords us this kind of function when on the background of the large screen you can call up an inset pip (picture in a picture),[4] even though it is transmitted via another channel. That is, we can see another picture by means of our peripheral vision. But of course, this example is but a paltry example of the type of thought we are trying to discuss.

Many of my latest works bear the name of a book. Books are open and closed, they can be thought of as important building blocks of our memory and of our information spread across space. Books written by humanity have that same deficiency inherent in our way of thinking, because they are generated from that thinking, with its narrative linearity and discreteness in time and space. Of course humanity, understanding this, has striven to find a solution to this problem. For instance, in the book of the Talmud, you can find the quote from the Torah in the center of a singe page , and on this same page there will be various commentary opinions are placed round about the main quotation and demarcated in another font. In modern literature, this approach, the presentation of multi-channeled or trucked information has been represented, for instance, by Milorad Pavich in Dictionary of the Khazars; in film by Akiro Kurosawa’s Rasemon; in music by Karlheinz Stockhausen with his “dimensional” music that added space to time… But the type of thought I am trying to elaborate in my works is much more than these attempts. It supersedes them and it is even possible that it no longer belongs to humanity, because if we qualitatively change our consciousness, by this very act we change the state of the worlds. Our consciousness will no longer examine ideas informed by a specific perspective, but will hover above them all and read them from all sides at once.

My series of works on “the name,” “reconstruction of the name,” “T-compositions” follow closely on this series of “the book.”  Each of these three-dimensional works depicts various schemas for the transformation of letters and texts, and this includes meanings dependent on point of view. Invisible letters and words change the meaning, information is seen as twisted.

Yet one more important moment. I am experiencing great difficulties with the reproduction of my three-dimensional works. It is impossible to print one and the same work in hundreds of turns (different reproductions are produced each time, and that means different information). The usual method of presenting a painting in this case is absolutely inadequate (I have even more complicated works in the installation than have been selected here), that is, the information level conveyed by these works no longer corresponds to the level of their printed representation. And in order to more adequately render them, it is necessary to employ a holographic press.[5] For this reason, I call the thought that describes my works holographic. 

Igor Ganikowskij. Odenthal. 2007/2008.


[1] According to the theory of John von Neiman and Alan Turing, the self-multiplying automaton, to which we can relegate the living organism, must preserve in itself in the form of a program, a store of information that is adequate to the complexity of its system.


[2] Humans, for some reason, piously believe in the seen, although herein lie the most dastardly of deceptions. 


[3] The gradual transition of humanity to this model of thinking is evidently connected with frontiers we have not yet broached. It is not dependent on the good will of the people, simply having nuclear weapons and problems that can never be solved in isolation. We have to negotiate, after all, all living things strive for self-preservation.


[4] I already began making paintings that exploited insets 25 years ago (my catalogue, Märkische Museum Witten).


[5] Here it is necessary to remark on one very important characteristic of the hologram. Any part of it, even the smallest, contains information about the whole hologram, as if the whole and the part are one.

“The real whole cannot exist entirely, as we have said, as an indivisible continuity: then the systems that have been partitioned by us from this whole can no longer be parts in the true sense of that word: they will be separate points of view of the whole. And, juxtaposing points of view, you cannot even begin to recreate the whole, just, multiplying a number of photographs of some object taken from various perspectives you could never get that object in its materiality.” Henri Bergson.