After a long ride in the street car down Queen St. West, I enter an area I seldom, if ever, venture to. As I enter the MOCCA (Museum of Contemporary Canadian Art), I’m greeted by a few people from New Media as well as the curator.

They all warn me that this exhibit is extremely dark, and I’ll likely be stumbling around if I don’t prepare for the experience. I’m obviously unsettled at the thought that this work will send me possibly crashing into other people, but I entered the gallery with an open mind. It is pitch black inside and some visual cues lead me toward a frame on my right. As I peek inside I notice that along the walls are mini scenes with life-like figures that are somehow interact in the diorama. Confused for a moment, I survey my surroundings and observe TV screens projecting these holograms into these mini-scenes. These holograms include people, boats and fireworks… and they are surprisingly realistic and stirring, unlike watching TV.

I was more immersed in watching these little scenes than any other kind of screen-based medium, as they felt much more “real”. The projection felt that they had significance and purpose, such as the case in which a woman is reacting and interacting to the mini-TV. Since you could move around the frame and change perspectives, it felt less of an image and more of a tangible space.

The holograms, in my eyes, felt more like ghosts of an actual image. They flashed and flecked like Princess Leia in Star Wars and did not entirely, and had a supernatural quality to them. This was more apparent on the projections that were of actual people. The non-human projections, however, blended seamlessly with the environment; the ship, for example, was difficult to differentiate from the diorama. This made the frames with human projections much more unsettling, as seeing a six-inch tall human interacting with the plastic world around them was something truly supernatural.

Looking back this piece, I see it as a gallery of small and isolated events designed in a way so the viewer felt they were a part of this world Hoffos created. In the darkness of the gallery, it was easy to get lost in these little worlds that you felt a spatially aware of.

By David Yu 500339212