So here we are.
I'm at home, as I'm sure many of you are, too.
And we've all begun to understand how our relationship with ourselves, with each other and the spaces we exist in can deeply impact our sense of identity and purpose.
So much has dramatically changed.
There's a sense of distance now unlike ever before.
But what if I told you that you could find a way from your heart to your hand to reconnect again, and that through this practice and embracing this cause, I could help you to recalibrate your mind so that you could explore this new reality with joy, enthusiasm, imagination and hope?
And all it would take is a simple pen.
To get you there, let's go back to the beginning.
As a kid growing up in a council estate in Southeast London, I was an outsider.
I'm the oldest of six kids, and all of my siblings look very English: blond hair, blue eyes, very cute.
And then there was me: half Nigerian, brown, with an Afro.
So what happens when you look different and you feel different, and in many ways, start to think differently from everyone and everything around you?
How do you find your way out of a dark, racist, homophobic and very lonely place?
This is where the pen comes in.
I started to draw.
So as you can see, I've got this pen, and it knows where it's going.
And I've learned very well how to follow it.
And the first thing I did is I followed this line, and I drew myself out of a culture that was only telling me what I couldn't do.
I trusted my pen, and it led me to Central Saint Martin's, a very fancy art school in London, where I graduated top of my year.
However, I soon realized there wasn't a place for me in London, because whether you wish to believe it or not, England is still a country that is rooted and functions within the class system.
And as a young, black, gay female artist from a working-class family, I didn't stand a chance.
So I left London and I moved to Japan, where I didn't experience people asking me where I was really from.
I was just another gaijin, which, ironically, means "outsider."
I was immersed in a culture that honors both making and craft, where people perfect their craft over generations.
It's a culture that masters both time and space, so that artists can truly create with freedom.
And what I discovered was a place I wasn't angry with.
Tokyo hadn't wronged me in any way.
I could no longer create with anger or out of pain.
I had to bravely allow myself to create from a different place.
And what I found is this incredible tool transcended a line on paper.
I found this thing that connected my head to my heart and my hand to everything.
I could see the world in new ways.
I found connections in corners and the solutions to problems I never knew existed.
It's like the world with all its positive and negative spaces could now be seen.
And just by seeing it, there was no longer any fear.
It's like my pen was a flashlight, and the unknown was still there, but it wasn't scary.
After five years of living in Japan and focusing on my craft, I felt like I needed a new challenge.
So I moved to New York, because that's what you do as an artist, right?
You move to the greatest city in the world that has the ability to make you feel completely and utterly invisible.
This is when I began to truly ask myself, "Who are you?"
I would wake up in the morning, and before I began my day, I would meditate on this.
And with this question in mind, I kept drawing.
I followed the line.
I let it lead the way.
The process of picking up a pen, something everyone has access to, the act of giving myself permission to let go of all thoughts, all fears, insecurities -- anything that would get in the way of allowing myself to be completely me -- that became my way of experiencing freedom.
When I got to New York, I didn't want to play by the rules of the art world.
I continued my practice as an outsider.
I kept drawing.
Curiosity became the ink for my pen, and I continued to dive deeper.
Over time, I began to create a bold, confident space for myself, a space that was all my own.
Initially, it was just my bedroom.
But that bedroom ended up in "The New York Times," and suddenly, I was being seen and known for this world I had created.
Since then, I've created and collaborated with some of the most unique artists, institutions and spaces, from the screens of Times Square, to the New York City Ballet for their incredible artist series, where I interviewed a number of dancers.
Their stories and words became the foundation of over 30 drawings and artworks, which took over the promenade walls, windows and floors.
For a long time, I wanted to create a space for contemplation and poetry.
And in 2019, I was given the opportunity to do just that by the Trust of Governor's Island.
They provided me with the perfect canvas in the form of a former military chapel.
Meet "The May Room."
With drawings on the exterior inspired by the history of the island, you walk inside, you take your shoes off, and there's a drawing on the floor in the form of a maze that brings you back to you.
It's an invitation to become calm.
And this allows you to see phrases on the wall.
"May you be wise."
"May you sleep housetimothy@example.com."
"May we save trees."
"May you," "may you," "may we."
And these phrases seem like they're rising from you or falling into you.
I've let my lines become much like a language, a language that has unfolded much like life.
And when there has been silence, I've sought connection through conversation, asking questions to push through the discomfort.
Drawing has taught me how to create my own rules.
It has taught me to open my eyes to see not only what is, but what can be.
And where there are broken systems, we can create new ones that actually function and benefit all, instead of just a select few.
Drawing has taught me how to fully engage with the world.
And what I've come to realize through this language of lines is not the importance of being seen, but rather the gift of seeing that we give to others and how true freedom is the ability to see.
And I don't mean that literally, because sight is only one way in which one can see.
But what I mean is to experience the world in its entirety, maybe even more so during the most challenging moments like the one we face today.
I'm Shantell Martin.
I draw.
And I invite you to pick up a pen and see where it takes you.
(Music)
If you're at all like me, this is what you do with the sunny summer weekends in San Francisco: you build experimental kite-powered hydrofoils capable of more than 30 knots.
And you realize that there is incredible power in the wind, and it can do amazing things.
And one day, a vessel not unlike this will probably break the world speed record.
But kites aren't just toys like this.
Kites: I'm going to give you a brief history, and tell you about the magnificent future of every child's favorite plaything.
So, kites are more than a thousand years old, and the Chinese used them for military applications, and even for lifting men.
So they knew at that stage they could carry large weights.
I'm not sure why there is a hole in this particular man.
(Laughter) In 1827, a fellow called George Pocock actually pioneered the use of kites for towing buggies in races against horse carriages across the English countryside.
Then of course, at the dawn of aviation, all of the great inventors of the time -- like Hargreaves, like Langley, even Alexander Graham Bell, inventor of the telephone, who was flying this kite -- were doing so in the pursuit of aviation.
Then these two fellows came along, and they were flying kites to develop the control systems that would ultimately enable powered human flight.
So this is of course Orville and Wilbur Wright, and the Wright Flyer.
And their experiments with kites led to this momentous occasion, where we powered up and took off for the first-ever 12-second human flight.
And that was fantastic for the future of commercial aviation.
But unfortunately, it relegated kites once again to be considered children's toys.
That was until the 1970s, where we had the last energy crisis.
And a fabulous man called Miles Loyd who lives on the outskirts of San Francisco, wrote this seminal paper that was completely ignored in the Journal of Energy about how to use basically an airplane on a piece of string to generate enormous amounts of electricity.
The real key observation he made is that a free-flying wing can sweep through more sky and generate more power in a unit of time than a fixed-wing turbine.
So turbines grew.
And they can now span up to three hundred feet at the hub height, but they can't really go a lot higher, and more height is where the more wind is, and more power -- as much as twice as much.
So cut to now.
We still have an energy crisis, and now we have a climate crisis as well.
You know, so humans generate about 12 trillion watts, or 12 terawatts, from fossil fuels.
And Al Gore has spoken to why we need to hit one of these targets, and in reality what that means is in the next 30 to 40 years, we have to make 10 trillion watts or more of new clean energy somehow.
Wind is the second-largest renewable resource after solar: 3600 terawatts, more than enough to supply humanity 200 times over.
The majority of it is in the higher altitudes, above 300 feet, where we don't have a technology as yet to get there.
So this is the dawn of the new age of kites.
This is our test site on Maui, flying across the sky.
I'm now going to show you the first autonomous generation of power by every child's favorite plaything.
As you can tell, you need to be a robot to fly this thing for thousands of hours.
It makes you a little nauseous.
And here we're actually generating about 10 kilowatts -- so, enough to power probably five United States households -- with a kite not much larger than this piano.
And the real significant thing here is we're developing the control systems, as did the Wright brothers, that would enable sustained, long-duration flight.
And it doesn't hurt to do it in a location like this either.
So this is the equivalent for a kite flier of peeing in the snow -- that's tracing your name in the sky.
And this is where we're actually going.
So we're beyond the 12-second steps.
And we're working towards megawatt-scale machines that fly at 2000 feet and generate tons of clean electricity.
So you ask, how big are those machines?
Well, this paper plane would be maybe a -- oop!
That would be enough to power your cell phone.
Your Cessna would be 230 killowatts.
If you'd loan me your Gulfstream, I'll rip its wings off and generate you a megawatt.
If you give me a 747, I'll make six megawatts, which is more than the largest wind turbines today.
And the Spruce Goose would be a 15-megawatt wing.
So that is audacious, you say.
I agree.
But audacious is what has happened many times before in history.
This is a refrigerator factory, churning out airplanes for World War II.
Prior to World War II, they were making 1000 planes a year.
By 1945, they were making 100,000.
With this factory and 100,000 planes a year, we could make all of America's electricity in about 10 years.
So really this is a story about the audacious plans of young people with these dreams.
There are many of us.
I am lucky enough to work with 30 of them.
And I think we need to support all of the dreams of the kids out there doing these crazy things.
Thank you.
(Applause)