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- Hello, good evening. My name is Kirstin Bach, I'm the Interim Director of Arts at the Exploratorium. I would like to begin tonight by welcoming you all back to the Exploratorium after an unprecedented 15-month closure in the 50-plus-year history of the Exploratorium. It's been wonderful to open our doors to you again, even with our masks on. I welcome you to this conversation on one of our first evenings of After Dark programming, since our reopening on July 1. I would also like to take a moment to acknowledge that the Exploratorium is on the land and waters of the Ramaytush Ohlone people, who in accordance with their traditions, have never ceded, lost, nor forgotten their responsibilities as the caretakers of this place in relationship to all who reside in and benefit from their traditional territory. We pay our respect to the Ramaytush Ohlone elders, both past and present. This program is also being broadcast live in collaboration with Arts, Letters and Numbers, as part of their exhibition titled, SunShip, The Arc That Makes The Flood Possible, held within the CITYX Italian Virtual Pavilion of the 17th Venice Architecture Biennale. This program is the first, of at least 10 upcoming Zoom programs through November, also known as Mr. Weschler's Cabinet of Wonders. For further details, just google, Arts, Letters and Numbers SunShip. We also give our thanks and appreciation to artist, architect, writer and educator, as well as the founding Director of Arts, Letters and Numbers, David Gersten, for this collaboration. Tonight, we're gonna hear all about the wondrous artwork, Aperture Lucida, that artist Tristan Duke created during his residency at the Exploratorium. Art plays a very important role in all that we do here. As a learning institution, the Arts provide yet another entry point to learning, art can be a language and a way of investigation that gives insight, leading to understanding and a way of knowing. This path of inquiry through the arts, I believe is the perfect way of introducing Tristan Duke and his work to you. His art practice truly embodies this notion of art as a way of knowing. Oops, the papers. The Exploratorium Artists in Residence Program was established in 1974, at it's best, it provides an experience for the artists to learn from us and we learn from them. Tristan's residency has done exactly that. A true inquirer, Tristan Duke is an artist and inventor, working at the intersection of Art, Science and contemplative practice. That was a big word for tonight. With a special interest in optics, perception and illusion, Duke explorers visual ways of knowing, inventing new mediums and engaging viewers in unexpected and dynamic ways. Tristan will be joined in conversation tonight via live stream with the writer extraordinaire, Lawrence Wechsler, who also dives headfirst into inquiry. As author Dave Eggers has noted, "His writing weaves a crazy and gorgeous web, "between science images, poetry "and every other great human endeavor." For over 20 years, Weschler was a staff writer at the New Yorker, he was the Director now emeritus of the New York Institute for the Humanities at NYU, and has served as the Artistic Director of the Chicago Humanities Festival. He continues to write regularly for Vanity Fair, The Atlantic, The Nation, McSweeney's and many other publications. His over 20 books include, Seeing is Forgetting The Name of the Thing One Sees, on artists Robert Irwin. Mr. Wilson's Cabinet of Wonder, on the museum of Jurassic technology in Los Angeles, and most recently, a biographical memoir, chronicling his 35-year friendship with the neurologist Oliver Sacks, entitled, And How Are You Dr. Sacks? Lawrence Weschler is also a former Osher Fellow at the Exploratorium. I could give endless accolades and bio information on our speakers tonight, but without further ado, I would like to give the mic over for the conversation at hand, Toward a Holographic Penoptics of the Mind. Thank you.

- Hello everybody, do you see Ren Weschler here on our little monitor?

- Yeah we were hoping that I can have little hands on the armchair there where I'm standing like I was a real person, but anyway, Tristan, it's so great to see you. And I thought we could talk a bit precisely about your practice, which has fascinated me for a long time and all of that is a way of leading to a conversation about this remarkable piece that you premiered, was it 15 months ago?

- Yeah, just over, yeah.

- The Aperture Lucid which we'll get to presently. No sooner had you premiered it and the whole place shut down and you almost shut down. I suspect you are one of the first people to get ill at that show. On opening night, you were really, really sick, but anyway, it's good to open it again and you know we've been doing so. So I was thinking we could talk a little bit about your prior practice, I know you put together some slides so that you could walk us through some of those, because I think that this didn't come out of nowhere and in fact, many, many of your earlier pieces rive interestedly with the piece you've currently been doing for the Global Exploratorium.

- Yeah, so at your request Ren I included a slide here of this is a much older piece. This dates back to over 15 years ago, doing these smaller--

- [Lawrence] Where were you? And you were in the town you grew up in right?

- Yeah, yeah, I started doing these pieces when I was still living in Champaign-Urbana, Illinois, and then I moved to Boulder, Colorado and I was still making these miniature dioramas. So these are like little boxes with lenses on them and then when you look inside the lens, you see these little miniature scenes and sometimes, little things happen with kind of lights turning on and different sort of dynamic things happening in the miniature rooms. But these are actually--

- [Lawrence] Because I remember the eyepiece that you were looking through in these pieces, they were carried down an apartment right acroos the street and you just poured out all the eyepieces from the doors.

- Yeah, exactly, these were people's, from doors that were scavenged. So yeah and these are actually diorama's, so they're three dimensional little rooms. Another kind of next series of work, a little later in my work, these are actually holograms, but you can kind of see the similar sensibility here with these sort of viewing boxes, built with light fixtures built in. There's a view looking in to one of the holograms.

- Let's go back to the hologram for a second, 'cause I just wanna say that, so this is what you were doing after high school, but you hadn't decided what you were gonna do with college yet and you then, well into this period, so you had to decide where to go to college and I think it came down to Cal Arts or an Naropa, is that right?

- Yeah, yeah, that's right. And why did you end up choosing Naropa? And personally what Naropa was?

- Yeah, so Naropa university, it's a Buddhist-inspired kind of curriculum that was founded by Alan Ginsburg, along with a Tibetan Lama, named Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche and so it's a contemplative-based university and I think the reason that I ended up in Naropa was that so much of my work really is all about kind of mind and perception and thinking about how we see and make meaning in the world. And so a lot of my work is infused with that kind of sense of inquiry and really looking at perception as the focus.

- I asked you that because I wrote a piece about you called The Magus in His Youth. I never got around to writing The Magus in His Prime yet, but I'll do that one of these days, but it ran into this magazine which probably disappeared, I think that we killed the magazine, but on the cover was this micro-miniature chair and there were a few things you were doing at Naropa, one of them was that you did a piece about, which I think will become important a little bit later also, about the acoustics of the Japanese tea ceremony and we'll talk about that more later. But the thing that was interesting here is that after you've done these dioramas, that you're looking out there and the holograms, you actually went into micro-miniature sculpture, where you were doing incredibly, incredibly precise, using literally individual hairs to make a chair. And the way the piece ends and while I was in the virtual green room right now, where people gather and I was in the dark, but I was able to just regard myself over the end of the piece and it talks about this practice we did, of how you were tried, how incredibly difficult it was to make this chair, how at one point, the first time you almost had it done and just as you were turning to the attachment of the final leg of the chair, an exceptionally delicate little bit of the process, a slight flicker of frustration flashed cross your mind, instantaneously transmitting itself to the tips of his fingers, so his hands shuddered barely a 32nd of an inch he figures, the sculpture looked like it had been run over by a truck. The next day he started again and you got all the way to the end and you just let out of an excalation of excitement and the hurricane blew away the chair that you made. You did a third attempt to do it. The next day, a third attempt, steady, steady, steady, and only after he safely stored the completed chair under an upturned cup, did you let out a full exhalation, at which point he felt the sudden desire to be out and about under the bright sun of the vast Colorado sky, jogging up a winding mountain road. Really deeply, he concluded and this was our conversation, "My arms swinging freely and with my heart pounding, "I was suddenly struck by an expansiveness "unlike anything I had experienced, "I felt so tiny and yet gigantic all at the same time "as my feet pounded against the mountain path, "I was repeating the mantra. "I am the point of a very fine needle." We'll get to that in a few minutes but I thought it's interesting that that piece ends that way. So after that, you began doing some other things. Let's go back to you and some of these other pictures you have brought.

- Yeah, so a lot of the work that I've been doing in the last 10 years has been around this idea of a hand-drawn holography.

- [Lawrence] These are hand-etched holograms?

- [Tristan] Yeah, so the way that I would describe this is that these are kind of the analog of, you know, photography is to drawing as holography is to this technique. So it really is a holographic drawing technique. It's all done by hand and I'm carving these essentially, micro-reflectors onto the surface of a polished plate.

- [Lawrence] I must tell you, by the way, you can get a sense of like you're with the image, but this is a two-dimensional thing. When you're in front of it, they are literally floating, hovering, these are platonic solids hovering two or three to four inches above the surface.

- Yeah, exactly, so you can get a little bit of a sense in the video, but you don't get the full dimensional effect, yeah.

- And what else have you got there?

- Yeah, and then another major part of my work over the last 10 years has been a collaborative practice with two other artists, Lauren Bon and Rich Neilsen in Los Angeles and this is the Optics Division of the Metabolic Studio. So this is part of the much larger Metabolic Studio practice which is Lauren's studio there in Los Angeles. But the liminal camera is a shipping container, a 20-foot long shipping container.

- [Lawrence] So the truck itself that comes from China? And then it ends up at the harbor and nothing's going back, like you know, so there's just a bunch of them there, you can go buy one for a $1000.

- [Tristan] Yeah, exactly, so this, you know, you poke a hole in the side of the shipping container and the light comes in and you have a camera. And so we've been operating this camera over the last 10 years, shooting monumental-scale photographs. So this is actually one of the smaller-sized negatives that come out of this camera, give you a sense of the scale we're working on in it.

- [Lawrence] You keep the photographic paper on the far side from where the hole is if you look at this.

- [Tristan] Yeah and we contact-print those to create positive images. So that's been big and then another project coming out of the Optics Division with Lauren and Rich has been this inquiry into kind of, recontextualizing photography as a land-based practice. So this adventure has taken us in all sorts of different directions but one of the key processes that we've developed in this inquiry is what we call lake-bed developing. So we found this naturally occurring brine pool in the Owens Valley that actually acts like a photo chemical agent. So it actually develops film, but as you can see, it develops film in it in a very unique way. So you get this kind of metallic chins, these unexpected colors and swirls of chemical reactions that are all sort of natural processes coming out of the lake.

- So we should pause for a second after this is over, just to look at this incredible photograph. This is a photograph effectively where you are shining the pinhole of the Owens Valley and the Owens Valley is effectively taking a selfie here, right?

- Yeah, exactly.

- Develop it in brine.

- You know, the way we think about it is this kind of idea of indexicality, this idea of a photograph of the landscape sort of made entirely out of the landscape. So developed in the chemistry that's naturally occurring in the land.

- It's worth remembering the reason this was naturally occurring chemistry is partly that the mountains all around the Owens Valley, when it was still a lake is where most of the silver was mine for what would become Eastman Kodak, so that they make film stock and then brought back and they were making Westerns in those same mountains, out of the film stock, but making the silver had poured all this horribly noxious stuff into the lake then and then when all the water of the lake was taken to California there was just this brine with all these chemicals that turn out to be able to develop film.

- [Tristan] Yeah, yeah. By the way, both in that fabric piece and in a piece I wrote about this whole process which was called Liminal Infrastructure, you can find them on my website, two pieces that I've written about you, and the website just launches, weschler.com, anyway, so continuing, so those are two examples, though what's this?

- So yeah, another process here, let's see if I can get this to play. It has been this inquiry that was first inspired by coming across a passage in ancient, Chinese alchemical text, talking about a lens made out of ice being used to start fire.

- [Lawrence] Of course you had to do it too.

- [Tristan] Yeah, I've been exploring making these special molds, actually, some of the early experiments of this happened right here at the Exploratorium. So you can see here the ice lens in it's special fixture melting and the focal length changes actually as it melts and then mounted in a camera here. So actually using ice lenses as an imaging tool, and this is actually shot through the ice lens.

- [Lawrence] So that is a picture of fire through ice?

- [Tristan] Yeah and this is some documentation I took of the aftermath of forest fires here in California.

- [Lawrence] As seen through ice.

- [Tristan] Yeah, but that's all in the past.

- And so a few years ago you arrive at, or before that, you started playing with another idea, which brings me to the immediate prelude to what you guys are doing there at the Exploratorium, it's also about this idea.

- Yeah, so what ultimately led to the piece Aperture Lucida was essentially a simple thought experiment of imagining this idea of imagine a board, with a bunch of holes poked in it and all of the holes are angled such that they all face towards a point floating out in space. So I kind of imagined this idea and was thinking that this would create basically like a simple, the way I was thinking of it as like a very crude hologram in the sense that it would create a virtual object, a little point of light that would float in space. So, you know, then I set about thinking about how I could make this.

- [Lawrence] Here's one of them done.

- [Tristan] Yeah, so the first attempt involved a really simple device of just drilling a hole in a board and then as you can see, this needle tool, can be moved around and poke through this foam-core sheet and it just requires poking a lot of holes.

- [Lawrence] A lot, a lot of holes.

- [Tristan] This first attempt was a little too crude. The pivot point where that needle passes through the board, wasn't really precise enough so I set about machining this gimbal that kind of allows all axes of freedom and this rod can slide through this little bushing here and basically you can see how this is a more precise version of the same thing. And the process was pretty labor-intensive. It basically just involved taking this needle and poking these holes one hole at a time and so over the course of a couple months of, you know, doing this whenever I had time and nearly giving myself like a repetitive stress injury.

- [Lawrence] And I hate to interrupt you, and say that as one of your friends during this period we began to fear for you. This was the period when, has happened to him and will we ever see him again.

- Exactly.

- Will he emerge somehow?

- And, you know, so as you can see, it's a lot of holes and the result was this. So you can see that subtle, can you guys see that subtle sort of a little Glint of light that's barely visible through there?

- [Lawrence] This is exactly what he said. He dragged all of us into his little studio and do this and say, see it, see it and he'd be very excited and we would be a little bit below him.

- Yeah, so somehow many of my projects start with something that somehow when I try to show it to other people, they can barely see it, you know, with the early scratch holograms, I had these little pieces of metal and plastic with these things on them and I'd show them to people and they'd be like, yeah, I guess I can kind of see it. I can kind of see what you're talking about, but I'd be like, look, you know, it's this amazing--

- You were so excited, you were a puppy. You were just so excited, well okay. You were telling me that there one person who saw it right away?

- Yeah, well, so the folks at the Museum of Jurassic Technology have always been, you know, a real supportive community and yeah, especially with, well, with all of this stuff, but I remember distinctly with the hand-drawn holograms, I would show people and everyone would be like, yeah, I don't know, I can't quite see what you're talking about but David Wilson was one of the early people that, you know, when I showed it to him, he was very encouraging and just like, oh, you know, Yeah, yeah, I see it, I see it, you know?

- David Wilson is the Founding Director of the Museum of Jurassic Technology and you had a little cubby hole in the back of the museum where you did a lot of this experiment.

- Yeah, I think in retrospect he was probably just being polite. So the next step, obviously from there, after nearly giving myself carpal tunnel, was to automate this and this is actually where I started the conversation with the Exploratorium. So the first prototype that we made at the Exploratorium using a CNC machine, a robot to poke all of these holes, you can see here, Liz Keim from the Exploratorium, playing with the early prototype there and what followed was--

- Just again to emphasize it, every single one of these holes is at a different angle, precisely determined different angle, right?

- Yeah, yeah, exactly, so there were a lot of engineering, kind of difficulties that we had to overcome. It's not quite as simple as you would think just to--

- Well if you believe me, I wouldn't think it was ever gonna be possible.

- Just to have the robot do it, this simple device that I built, you know, this needle poking device, right, it actually is accomplishing, so this simple mechanism is actually accomplishing something that in the CNC world is pretty complicated. It's a five-axis operation. So we had to do some clever kind of trickery to even be able to get the CNC machine to be able to kind of reproduce this effect. But we did a lot of prototyping, actually too many, various little different prototypes to even go into here but I included a selection of some of the major steps. So after we first figured out kind of the basic of how to get the image made, then we started scaling up a little bit and we also started troubleshooting this idea of how the effect could cross a corner and starting to think about not just having one sheet, but having multiple sheets that could actually meet and the basic idea of this corner operation is to create like a full 360 degree illusion. So here's a model and notice how, as this spins around, it's configured in such a way that as the ball of light sort of falls off one side, it gets picked up by the next panel. So you really have this full 360-degree experience where you can walk all around it.

- [Lawrence] Let's make clear by the way that this ball of light is a ball of light, there is no ball. This is just immaterial, glowing.

- [Tristan] Yeah and of course what you can't see once again, because we're looking at a flat screen, is the dimensional effect, so in any of these videos, like when Liz is manipulating this thing here, you can kind of get the sense from the parallax, the motion parallax as she moves it around, but that ball of light is a good, you know, foot and a half behind the screen that she's holding. So from there, once we kind of sorted out this corner question, we still were not sure how this thing would scale once we went up to the much larger scale that I wanted to be able to do. So this is another prototype here and notice, this prototype has these secondary images. So there's kind of this flower pattern around the central sort of virtual object of the ball of light.

- [Lawrence] Again just to make sure this is floating in midair. What you're actually looking at are a bunch of dots, but it has this effect of being--

- Yeah and, you know, basically the concept for the final piece is illustrated here. So creating the lines that you see there, are showing the kind of directions of the light paths and we have all of these holes that are all focused and pointing towards that one central point. So again, you know, a lot of the sort of troubleshooting around this project was around, you know, just the sheer number of holes we had to drill and trying to figure out how to get the machines to be able to feasibly do this and get them to line up the way we needed them to.

- [Lawrence] Can you imagine any other place but the Exploratorium where you could do this kind work?

- I mean, the Exploratorium really was the perfect laboratory to be doing this and, you know, there's a lot of people that helped to make this happen. That's Ray Grunig there, who worked with me through most of the entire process. Peter Taylor was instrumental. You know, we had a lot of amazing minds, you know, there were a lot of conversations just about, you know, how do we make this happen? What kind of tooling do we need? How can we get it to work? So installation was no small feat either. We had to build a special kind of rig just to get these panels up and align them.

- For those of you who are there in the audience, when you go back and look at the thing, look at it from the side and you realize it's like five different panels, each panel or five pinholes, would pull the different points in the panels and so forth.

- Yeah, so actually each individual panel is made up of 10 discreet sheets. So that gives you an idea of, you know, so every single hole is actually 10 holes that need to line up. So this is the finished piece and actually I'm gonna just run this short little intro to the video, which the full video, it's like a five minute video online, but I'm just gonna run a minute or so here, you can watch it on YouTube if you wanna see the full thing, but this gives you a sense of the piece. As the viewer walks towards this ball of light, it very much appears to be in the space of the room and as they move back and forth or change their position, the ball of light behaves like an object that has permanence in the room. And then as you actually approach, and then step into the ball of light, the experience opens up and shifts radically. The ball of light sort of expands to consume you and at the same time, sort of explodes and disappears. At that point, the mechanism of the sculpture, becomes apparent, what appeared to be this black monolithic surface is in fact, riddled with holes and these holes are all precision-aligned in order to create this optical illusion. So a couple of things on the video. So one of the effects which we were exploring is so not only does this configuration of holes create this virtual ball of light, but this experience of then walking into this ball of light, of course, when you reach that central focus point, all of the holes are oriented toward you and so suddenly, what was this black wall becomes like a transparent screen that you can see through, so that was one of the--

- The effect is of blowing your mind. And that's what I mean, there is a kind of subject-object relationship to you. there's the ball, there's you, there's the ball, there's you and then suddenly.

- Yeah and one of the really fun things to experience is how people physically viscerally react. I mean, some people actually sort of a flinch almost as they pop into the ball because it feels like you're walking into something. And so it's one of the most gratifying parts of this piece was just being able to see visitors interact with it and just discover for themselves all of the different ways that they could explore it.

- The people at the Exploratorium, their Social Science Division should have a little window into this and they could just watch people's reactions.

- Yeah and another thing I wanted to mention from the video that we watched formerly and actually I'm gonna back it up and just kind of play that first part again. So the sound that you're hearing is actually a sound installation that's in the room and so when you walk into the room, you hear kind of one noise that's happening, which you're hearing now but then as you walk into the ball of light there's actually a directional speaker that focuses sound into that focal point and so when you actually walk into the focal point there's another part of the composition that happens in that focal point.

- Its not just light waves, it's sound waves too.

- Yeah, so I knew that I wanted to have some kind of sound element and that this kind of directional speaker would be a part of it and this composer, Matt Barbier, who's based in Los Angeles and also part of the Museum of Jurassic Technology family, he composed this amazing kind of sound score for that piece and also the Exploratorium's Wayne Grimm was instrumental in making all of that come together, helping me to think through the acoustics of the space and helping to measure what the resonance of the room was so that Matt could kind of compose that piece and thinking about the acoustics of this directional speaker but the effect is pretty profound because not only do you have this optical cue of seeing this ball of light, you're also hearing it when you're in the space.

- I would suggest that this goes back to your interest in the phenomenology of the sound of a Japanese tea ceremony.

- Absolutely, yeah, Matsukaze, the sound of the cattle is the tea ceremony is called a wind in the Pines, yeah.

- Oh and by the way, you were pointing out in that piece that laughter can break out at any time, what are the sounds of the tea ceremony, where it's kind of silence and laughter and that's definitely what's going on in that room.

- Absolutely, yeah and I think that, you know, this piece, really is about playing with space and kind of void. So there's this tension right, between looking at and looking through, right? And so, you know, one of the experiences of this piece is this thing that you think you were looking at that you think is here in space, when you actually come up and get there, it dissolves and you realize that you're actually looking through and that you're seeing what you thought was here is actually there, right?

- So also it has a feeling of being seen. When you get into the point where every point is pointed at you, you are, you know, just partially looking at something, something suddenly you are seen. The whole world's, you know, there's no place that does not see you, you must trade your life for a look at the exhibition.

- [Tristan] Exactly. Yeah and the piece really is about kind of, it's sort of the sculpture is like a device for exploring different points of view and there's a lot of things that you can do actually with someone else where you can say, okay, you stand there and I'll try doing this and it's actually a fantastic experience to explore with other people. But yeah, I guess that, that also.

- One of the things that's interesting here is that this whole discussion is the world is plain, but you and I been having some conversations recently about how it also rhymes with a far darker plague in recent history. We might wanna gradually move over to justify the title of this entire hologram, the Hologram is just Panopticon.

- Yes, yeah, so the Panopticon is a prison design, actually proposed by a man named Jeremy Bentham in the late 1700s and so the basic structure of the Panopticon is it's an idea of constructing a prison so that a single guard could monitor all of the prisoners from one position. So from a central guard tower, there's a view afforded into all of the cells. So here you can see this is actually one of the few existing prisons built, following Jeremy Bentham's design.

- Jeremy Bentham, he was the famous founder of utilitarian, he was a very important philosopher. And he was doing this, I think, not as some statistic, mad thing, but as some kind of, you know, restorative, redemptive, I don't know, correctional institution.

- Yeah and of course this became central to Foucalt's kind of examination of the, the systems of power, right? Power and knowledge, so this is the Stateville Prison actually in my home state of Illinois. And this is one of the few prisons, kind of built along Bentham's design. So you can see here, here's the central guard tower and then we have all of these cells arrayed around it. And then you can see, this is tracing the viewpoints, the sight lines out of that central guard tower. And so, you know, you can see the similarities here.

- [Lawrence] When did that occur to you, by the way? At what stage of all this did you settle it and say, oh wait a second, what am I doing here?

- [Tristan] Say that again.

- At stage of the whole process did you suddenly have this rive occur to you and was it unsettling when it did?

- You know, it was, the awareness was there, you know, kind of from the early prototypes, but I think it was only once I really built the full scale one that I started really thinking of it more architecturally, right? 'Cause Bentham's design is an architecture. And, you know, once you start scaling this piece up to architectural scale, it really starts calling that to mind more clearly. So clearly the focal point of Aperture Lucida functions like the position of the guard tower in the Panopticon. But you know, the question that I had was, you know, and this is something I've been thinking about since the pandemic, basically after building the sculpture, and kind of experiencing it on an architectural scale, I started to wonder, does the similarity go further? Does the Panopticon actually project, you know, a virtual ball of light and does it, so in other words, does the Panopticon function as a holographic optical device?

- [Lawrence] By the way, where was it in?

- [Tristan] Illinois.

- [Lawrence] Illnois, do they have windows on the far side that go through or the prisoners are just walled within.

- Yeah, we'll get to that, but actually in Bentham's design, you know, having windows was actually an essential part of the design, but to kind of explore this and test this theory, I built a model and as we can see here, let's see if this will play, okay? So I built a 3D model and if we look inside the Panopticon, you can see the central guard tower there and then we're gonna remove the guard tower. And I don't know if you guys can see that, this might be one of those things where I'm saying, can't you guys see it, but--

- [Lawrence] Sure we're gonna have to say yes. Everybody clap and Tris lives.

- Hopefully this looks kind of familiar. So you can see that actually what it's doing is it's focusing and projecting light, just like Aperture Lucida is like creating, essentially, like a virtual guard tower, even though we've removed the guard tower. So the next question of course is, you know, okay, yeah, yeah, yeah. So that's all fine and good in a computer model, but would, you know, an actual prison function this way? You know, this is like a theoretical ideal situation, you know, certainly you wouldn't actually see this in a real Panopticon prison. So I did a little more research and it turns out, this is the ruins of the Presidio Modelo in Cuba, which was built in the 1920s. It actually follows Bentham's design more faithfully than pretty much any other prison built, as far as I know. And incidentally in 1953, Fidel Castro and 20 some of his companions were also imprisoned here after their first failed attempt at revolution. But you can see clearly, hopefully you can see in this slide the Aperture Lucida-style halo of light around the guard tower. And here's another shot from the same ruined prison. And again, see how the light is being focused again.

- So that every person in that prison would have had a window on the far side that would present them in silhouette to the guards. It's horrifying, it's really, really terrifying. Apparently and I think in a way it looks just like China today, I mean that's basically the state--

- Well, I mean, really it's like all of us today in our online lives, right? The new Panopticon is just how we trade our privacy for just kind of, you know, the kind of all-seeing eyes.

- Well, on that cheery note, I thought maybe we could begin to open this to people in the audience who've been the eyes looking at us this whole time. You are the focus of it a Panopticon of viewers, both in the house and in the world watching by video, maybe we could invite people there to respond to some of this, if there's any questions.

- Yeah, do we have any questions in the in-person audience perhaps?

- And I believe people in the world at large could use that function too.

- That's true, the virtual folks, you can also ask questions and we will pass those on. Oh, we have a question in-house, here.

- [Student] Thank you very much that's a wonderful piece. I had a question about the final construction. You mentioned early on, you had a lot of challenges, making the angles of the holes be appropriate. Using 10 different layers did that eliminate that challenge? Could you go with just orthogonal holes for each of the layers?

- Yeah, it's great question. So yes it simplified things in the sense of that was a way of working around needing a five-axis machine. So yes, all of the holes could be just, straight orthogonal drilling operations, but it added a considerable complexity in the sense that every single hole was now made up of 10 separate holes that needed to line up precisely. So, you know, as with any kind of engineering challenge, right, you're kind of shifting the accounts around, you're taking some of the difficulty off of this area and just shifting it over to another area.

- Essentially by the way, at the Exploratorium, so many of the displays that are about some physical process or some biological process or so forth, the better display is display of remarkable ingenuity on the engineering side. You could imagine doing a period at the Exploratorium, which was only about the engineering that have made these different displays, it would be quite fascinating.

- [Tristan] Absolutely.

- So in this case it would be.

- And there's some amazing engineers who are are here, yeah, any other questions? We got an in-house question here from Craig.

- [Craig] It's a little frightening. How are you going to move it, if you have to ship it somewhere, how does that work?

- We were just talking about that. And it's actually interesting because for those of you who know, you know, there's an entire field of interferometry and sort of a metrology, Moire metrology and in fact, this particular optical effect could rightly be classified as a very constrained example of a Moire. It's like a Moire pattern without any secondary or tertiary images, it's just the primary Moire. And what that means is so Moire metrology, they actually use Moire patterns to be able to track minute movements. It's a way of it sort of through the leverage, the kind of optical leverage kind of amplifying very slight deviations. And so the effect of that is that any very small movement between the front and back panel, has a massive effect on the virtual image. So what that means is that all those seams, all those places where the image lines up, if any of those panels shift, the image moves really wildly. So it turns out that it's actually a small miracle that it came together as well as it did and Ray, Ray Grunig was doing some of the fine tuning when I was like at home sick. So he got to deal with a lot of the really nitty gritty at the end, but, amazingly, it did work, but it is a little bit tricky to get those panels lined up. So it's not something you wanna take down and put up every day.

- Do us a favor and get rid of that prison so we can look at the other piece again, if you can, that's a little bit disconcerting to see the prison behind you this whole time.

- Yeah, we'll go there.

- Yeah, let's go there, okay, other questions. Anybody in the world, have you any?

- [Instructor] We have a question from the online audience. Nathan Berenbaum asks, hello Tristan, how does this analog effect relate to the laser holographic phenomenon?

- Yeah, so that's a good question and thanks for asking it. I've been playing it pretty fast and loose in this talk with using the word holography. So this of course is not truly a textbook hologram because it doesn't involve any kind of interference imaging. So, you know, this is actually more rightly related to kind of barrier screen parallax kind of displays. But I think it is actually very interesting to think of it in terms of holography, because, you know, again, with the hand-drawn holograms, a lot of what I'm working with is trying to understand the fundamental structure of a hologram and trying to give sort of more tangible, visible ways for people to interact with and understand how information about an image can be distributed across the surface and how, you know, something like a single point can actually have information about that point distributed across a large area. So there is a lot to be said about, you know, the relationship that this has to real holography, unlike some other, you know, techniques, that get called holography that really are just being called holoography because they're 3D. This actually, there's kind of a reason that I'm contextualizing it within the realm of holography beyond just its 3D-ness.

- [Kirstin] This question is the live audience and Tristan, we're way in the back.

- [Student] Yeah, so a minute ago you mentioned Moire patterns and metrology. For those of us who aren't versed in the jargon, can you break those down for us?

- Well, basically it's a little too much to get into here, but there's ways of doing really precise measurements. So if you've ever been driving down the freeway and seeing like fences that line up, like chain-link fences, layers of chain-link fences, that's a Moire pattern when you see that kind of other ghostly sort of patterns start to emerge or multiple screens lined up on top of each other. And that kind of patterning can be used to make really precise measurements of surfaces. So it's a technique that is used in engineering and analysis. So yeah, I think we're getting close to the end of the online session.

- What I wanted to say before we go was I wanted to turn it back to you, but those of you who are looking at me right now, my face in the screen, I was told to move it, you know, move my screen up and down until it got to exactly this size by the people there in San Francisco, and said, okay, now you're perfect. They did not realize, but they had me put my face in such a way that it feels right and the reason it feels right, ladies and gentlemen is because, if you go from the top of the screen to the bottom, and you break it into a golden section, so it's from the bottom and then you go to this level here, that's one and this is 1.618, so let me get over here. So the area for my eyes to the bottom, if that's one, the area from my eyes, the top is 0.618, which is the golden section. I mentioned this is because Walter Burch, the great film-maker has been obsessing about how this constantly happens in films and that cinematographers who have no knowledge that they're doing this constantly arrange to have this be the right way and if I were smaller, my eyes would be at that place and so forth. Anyway, the point of all this is that a week from tomorrow, Arts, Letters and Numbers and I will be having a conversation with Walter Burch about the golden section in cinematography, so you're welcome. go to Arts, Letters and Numbers and you can register for that conversation.

- Also part of the Venice Biennale, a series of conversations, Mr. Weschler's Cabinet of Wonder, right?

- Right, so anyway, that's just to give you, and then you, I was gonna ask you before we leave, what are you working on right now? Give us a little bit of a preview.

- Yeah, I think, so we're at 8:59, so there's gonna be a hard ending for the online people that we've been told we have to wrap up right at nine but for those of you who are in the live audience, we can actually hang out and have a couple more questions and continue if you wanna stay. But I'm gonna just go ahead and thank all of the people in the live audience for joining us, thank you.