The Mysteries of Space

Posted by Kathleen Griffin on 2014/09/04 Leave a comment

The Mysteries of Space

Sketching Tornado’s on Classified Documents

The declassified state secrets arrive by Fed Ex, stacked in the envelope written out neatly by hand. The paper delicately yellowed. It was the eighties after all, the Star Wars Project. Specifically, this stack details the effects of wind turbulence on the beta electron accelerator. Or spoken more plainly, the machine that was to shoot the missiles out of the sky. I will be drawing tornadoes across them as part of my larger drawing project, “The Mysteries of Space”.

Something between a Sketchbook and a Journal

This work considers the heavens from a very different perspective than the other physicists I am working with. I flip through the pages of carefully written numbers. Even the white-out corrections feels dated. The intimacy of the calculations, the beauty of the numbers unravel in something between a sketchbook and a journal, encoded in the physical laws of mathematics, a long poem about what we were afraid of, and memories of a truly a different age. Unique in this project, I feel lucky to have this access. I sit with the papers, in the physicists’ position, thinking of the sky from the angle of defense and cold war strategies of my Reagan childhood when World War III was the push of a red button. This is the math that expressed it. The machine that was supposed to keep us safe. The delicate numbers that form those gestures in black pen, with red corrections, the equations that held those possibilities. My attachment to this work is different to the other physicists involved, in my project, the connection so deep, pulled from my little girl nightmares of mushroom clouds and cold war realities. A collective nightmare we dreamed together.