Balancing Act

2020

 

Billions of us humans learn to walk, then spend our lives seeking to maintain our balance. Our inner sensory systems are keenly at work, sending commands that shift our weight ever so slightly as we stand, finding equipoise against the forces that would topple us.

 

Having mastered it on two feet, we have extended the idea of balance to everything from our accounting, to our relationships with others, to the physics of our machinery. We give thumbs-up to the concept, our arms precisely extended in the process.

 

Mother Nature has her own concept of balance and has been at it a lot longer than we have. She has maintained a fine atmospheric equipoise while we humans learned to walk upright, moved on to flint tools, and shortly thereafter to iPhones. In the process, she has kept the climate just right for us to extend our population into every cozy cranny on the planet.

 

In this kinetic sculpture, the various physical elements that interact to affect the atmosphere and climate are seen as dynamic elements in play. Movement of any element influences the movement of the others, in complex and sometimes unpredictable patterns. Nevertheless, the combined motions have always left a relatively long-term planetary stability. In this piece, all axes of rotation pass through the center of the spherical earth, thus assuring that it may rotate but not translate. If something bends, all bets on stability are off!

 

We humans have reached the point that we can affect climatic stability, and we need to extend our notion of balance to a planetary scale. Don’t bend anything too far!