Holography in general space-times

We provide a background-independent formulation of the holographic principle. It permits the construction of embedded hypersurfaces (screens) on which the entire bulk information can be stored at a density of no more than one bit per Planck area. Screens are constructed explicitly for AdS, Minkowski, and de Sitter spaces with and without black holes, and for cosmological solutions. The properties of screens provide clues about the character of a manifestly holographic theory.