Escape Velocity resonates in my mind a lot with mentoring, an idea that has always driven my entrepreneurial spirit.
Escape velocity is a very simple and yet fundamental concept for space conquest. It is the minimum speed you need to give to an object for it to reach and stay in orbit. A lower velocity is a waste of energy because the object would just fall down. A higher velocity results in a higher orbit and is also a waste of energy because the object does not need it: it should, instead, harvest energy from space to go to higher orbits. There lies the analogy with mentoring.
Escape velocity is an important concept in physics that describes the minimum speed an object needs to escape the gravitational pull of a planet, moon, or other celestial body without requiring additional propulsion. It plays a significant role in space exploration, satellite launches, and our understanding of the universe. Without sufficient escape velocity, an object launched into space would eventually be pulled back by gravity.
As an artist, particularly one who is constantly tapping into the escape velocity needed to fly from mundane routine, repetition and oppression, other issues concern me. As a visual artist I work with the poetics of escape velocity rather than the science that allows us to blast off the planet and speed into space.
My evolution as an artist has been determined by how we, a population of humans, work on the Earth’s crust; we see movements of planetary restlessness… shifting continental plates which in turn mitigate tsunamis, earthquakes and volcanic eruptions… that are calamitous for all of us, these revelations of all the inner incandescence of our fiery globe. We sense that only on the surface of the Earth is a crust that can, in a process called invention, be manipulated into enduring goods both benign and destructive.
We sense that Earth is a particle of the sun, separated from the sun by a cosmic explosion. We see that both the sun and Earth are in the midst of a cosmic cataclysmic time in which our work extends its transitory and vulnerable intelligible time. Alternatively sensing the imminence and inevitability of a disaster that will annihilate any trace of human presence we resolve to activate all of them in the present. We commit all our forces formed and shaped by past events and give their skill, sensitivity and momentum to our present. We make the work before us the condensation of all the works we ever wanted or shall ever want to accomplish.
Now we are at the beginning of the space age, an age that is fundamentally driven by a fiery escape velocity… unsurprisingly it remains a key concept in humanity’s continuing effort to understand and travel through space.
