inside, to our own experience, and trust that what we’re feeling and thinking actually matters. And when we go there - to that place Sze’s work takes us if we let it, something remarkable happens. Sarah Sze’s work helps us make sense of the world in which we live through the fanciful celebration of the utilitarian. Her pieces allow the manufactured objects of our everyday reality to transcend their intended contexts, and find a new, organismic relationship to one another, and to us. Sze is both discovering and developing the kinds of repetitive patterns that give human beings the reference points they need to resonate playfully rather than strategically with the material and visual world. Or, to put it much more simply, Sarah is recreating nature out of the unnatural - and beholding these natural systems - these imaginative playscapes - changes us forever. Perhaps the best metaphor I can use to explain the odd reassurance I feel on encountering one of Sze’s installations is that of a fractal. Fractals are the computergenerated graphic representations of nonlinear equations. Unsatisfied with the overdetermined and oversimplified techniques of traditional linear math and reductive calculus, new math theorists sought to find ways of representing the genuine complexity of our physical world in the perfect language of numbers. They found that by representing the fractional dimensionality of the real world, they could reckon with the roughness of reality. Of course the billions of calculations required to iterate fractals must be accomplished using a computer. They are products of the computer age. Yet, surprisingly, they yield forms that exemplify the most natural of living systems. Fractals are self-similar. This means at one level of magnification, you will be able to see certain shapes that are repeated again at much higher levels of magnification. Just as
the shapes of veins in a leaf reflect the shapes of branches in a tree or trees in the forest, computer-generated fractals reflect the selfsimilarity of numbers. As above, so below. The networked systems that fractals represent also tend to have what are known as “remote high leverage points.”Although these systems might be extremely stable, profound change can come from extremely remote places, if conditions are right. My own work in cultural analysis has been largely informed by these discoveries and intuitions. Like the ocean and the weather, our society has been networked together through the media, economic, and telecommunications infrastructures. We