When the news broke, more than a generation ago, that there now existed a medium capable for the first time of reproducing objects in three dimensions, holography seemed to herald a brave new world of 3-D cinema, photography, and television. But that was presumably because holography was still in its infancy, at a stage of development comparable to the earliest experiments in cinematography. At least in popular imagination, faith in holography's promise was for a long time unshakable. But over time, the promise of ultimate illusion that holography released into cultural space gradually became detached from holography itself. The viewer of a hologram might move about, but the objects stonily stayed put.
Virtual reality is clearly part of the current wave of new technologies.
It depends on the most advanced cybernetic system presently available, the interactive computer, and in its principles and procedures it is obviously part of the same generation of devices as the Internet and the Web. Holography, by contrast, seems scarcely to belong to the twentieth century at all. Being homeless, holography can only migrate in time, and as it does so, it is able to reveal something of the way that cultural processes, too, are never wholly rooted in their own time, or exhausted there. To be in culture is to move among many different times and spaces, within a present that is more like a palimpsest than it is like a fresh page, more like a nexus than a point on a line. What Bibliomancy insists on, in the books it displays, is their intricate and idiosyncratic relation to historical time.