Sculpture
Scratch Holography
Holographic images created by scratching patterns into reflective surfaces — exploiting light diffraction to produce three-dimensional imagery without lasers.
Studies
Each scratch is a tiny curved mirror. Under a point light source, every arc reflects a glint back to the viewer's eye from a specific angle — the brain reads the cluster of glints as a three-dimensional surface. Move your head and the image shifts in parallax, exactly like a laser hologram, but made with nothing more than a compass and a sheet of polished plastic.
Process
The toolpath starts as a 3D model decomposed into concentric scratch arcs — one family of curves per depth layer. A custom Processing sketch (Holography_P53) computes the arc geometry: center position, radius, and angular extent for each scratch, controlled by Z_PLANE, Z_DEPTH, and EYE_POSITION parameters.
The computed paths export as SVG, then run through a CNC toolpath editor for machine parameters — a #10 0.004in engraving bit at 725mm/min feed rate, scratching 1mm deep into acrylic. The result is thousands of microscopic grooves that collectively reconstruct a face when lit by a single point source.
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