Dan Schweitzer has participated from early on in the development of holographic aesthetics, since it's in 1974 when he gets started on a practical level at the New York School of Holography, from which he became an instructor. His former original training on theatre and scenic arts will be revealed definitive and clearly in the visual mes sage of his holographic production. He studied at Penn State Univer sity and Catawa College in North Carolina and in 1969 he moves to New York to pursue his career in theatre and movies, besides starting collaboration in art and video with an old mate from summer reper toire companies Sam Moree.
It is in 1977 when together with Moree he starts up the New York Holographic Laboratories on 1 3th West Street where hundreds of aficionados as well as the cream of artist-holographers meet. A follower of the practical teachings of Stephen A. Benton and inspired by the artistic content of Ruben Nuñez's work he has been able to synthesize both influences in a teaching work that has taken him to the Royal Photographic Society of Bath (England) and to the Nathan Mayheu Seminars in Martha's Vineyard (Massachusetts).
At first he shapes small figures that are used as characters on his holographic stages inhabited by reflections on his own activity as a holographer, homages to Einstein for his genial contribution at understanding space-time, and where he studies a game of complicities with the viewer at the unlighting of a new space-light, a domain all of his images seem to be headed to. As Rosemary Jackson once said: "Each hologram turns into a performance that needs our attention to be able to exist because the spectator completes the drama"
According to Marcia Merryman-Means "Schweitzer sculpts metaphoric windows of pure light... transformed into an image through which he makes us reflect on the nature of the perception." The above mentioned theatrical stage culminates at the triptych called The Gallery executed during one of his two artist residences at New York Museum of Holography, on which there's a complete staging of a hologram exhibition with is different images included. The baroque theme of the picture inside a picture, crucial to XVII century european painting is staged here with complexity through sophisticated holographic techniques. The optical distortions of geometric and abstract shapes flow and are projected among the visitors to the gallery up to the viewer's space outside of the holograms, creating a kind of holokinetic hyperparallax, a perceptive effect substantial to many of his works.
While being an outstanding Rainbow or white light transmission holography practicant, colour is also one of the most significant aspects of his work, when he mixes the spectral colours on a complementary way as if they were pigments that can be sculpted into light-shapes.
During the last years Schweitzer has developed a one step technique, inspired on a similar Benton technique, very flexible when he configurates his holographic imagery, paradoxic and immaterial, which at the same time interacts with the sculptoric models now removed from the holographic space, and that become an integral and physical part of the work as if they were sculptures incorporating holograms, establishing a material bridge between hologram and spectator.
"l wanted to bring some kind of humanity to it (holography), so immediately I began working with figures... The other thing that occurred to me was a cinematic approach to the medium. I felt that holography was a little bit... more like film than it was photography at that time, and l wanted to try and get a whole, like a tableau... to try and communicate an overall concept in the shortest possible moment, kind of a slice of life."
Quoted in Report of the First International Congress on Art and Holo graphy ,90 (Notre Dame, IN: Saint Mary's College, 1991), p. 34.

Text written by Vicente Carreton