Towards a Holographic Panoptics of the Mind,Or: What on Earth is That Thing?
July 15th, 2021
Tristan Duke & Lawrence Weschler
At first the thing presents itself as a thick black monolith, hovering in midair at the heart of a gleaming white cube of a room—or wait, not a monolith, two monoliths perpendicularly wedged, the one fast against the other. And nested there, four feet out from where the dense black plinths intersect, floats an amorphous immaterial globe of light, which seems to bob in rhythm with each step the visitor takes toward it, or rather toward the crowd of other visitors already gathered round it, drop jawed before the stupefying apparition. But go ahead, join them, and in fact summon up the gumption to step between them so as to lean your head into the ball of light, at which point, like magic, the entire black edifice will simply disappear.
Welcome to Aperture Lucida, the latest creation of the young Southern California magus, Tristan Duke, product of over two years work as artist in residence alongside fellow materials wizards at the Exploratorium. The piece veritably brims with surprising implications, which Lawrence Weschler, the author of Mr Wilson’s Cabinet of Wonder, will assist Mr. Duke in teasing out.
The Exploratorium is pleased to partner with Arts Letters & Numbers in presenting this public discussion as part of “SunShip: The Arc That Makes The Flood Possible,” Arts Letters & Numbers’ exhibition in the CITYX Venice Italian Virtual Pavilion of the 17th Venice Architecture Biennale.