Artist Tristan Duke and writer Lawrence Weschler discuss the intersections of art, science, and technology, centering on Duke’s unique practice that spans interdisciplinary research, expeditionary adventurism, and unusual technologies of his own invention.

Presented in conjunction with Duke’s solo exhibition at SITE SANTA FE, Glacial Optics, the conversation explores the “gaze of the glacier” and Duke's inventive process: transforming glacial ice into functional camera lenses used to photograph the glaciers themselves. We learn how Duke’s polar expedition gave way to a dynamic series of works, ranging from aerial photography over the Sierra Nevada, to documentary images of wildfires across the American West, to working in laboratories where scientists examine data from ice cores carved from the depths of glaciers.

Lawrence Weschler was born in 1952 in Van Nuys, California, and graduated from Cowell College of UC Santa Cruz in 1974. He joined The New Yorker magazine in 1981 and served as a staff writer there for the next twenty years, shuttling between coverage of political tragedies and cultural comedies. He spent the next fifteen years (2001–16) as the director of the New York Institute for the Humanities at NYU (now emeritus). His often award-winning nonfiction reportage at The New Yorker and other venues (including Vanity Fair, The Atlantic, Harper’s, McSweeney’s, The New York Times Magazine, and NPR) has resulted in over twenty books, including Seeing is Forgetting the Name of the Thing One Sees (on California Light and Space artist Robert Irwin); True to Life (on David Hockney); Mr. Wilson’s Cabinet of Wonder (on the Museum of Jurassic Technology); Boggs: A Comedy of Values (on the antic career of money artist J.S.G. Boggs); Calamities of Exile: Three Nonfiction Novellas (featuring complicated heroes in flight from Iraq, Czechoslovakia, and South Africa); Vermeer in Bosnia; Everything that Rises: A Book of Convergences (just selected by Auraist as “the best written book of criticism of the century thus far”); And How Are You, Doctor Sacks? (on the author’s thirty-five-year friendship with the late neurologist Oliver Sacks); and A Trove of Zohars. He is also the longtime director of the Ernst Toch Society, devoted to the music of his Weimar émigré composer grandfather.

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