Taking from the famous statement, “Man can never step twice into the same river” by Heraclitus (of 465 BC), describing the flux of the ever changing world where nothing repeats itself in nature of the universe, it seemed curious to me what it would look like if nature did repeat itself. For me, an obvious place to envision this notion was in tree branches (displaying fibonacci sequence) where the random order of growth is easily available for our view.

Duplicating two tree branches each containing two twigs into multiples by casting them, then rearranging and fusing them to artificially create random order, is basically a modular sculpture oddly still resembling branches of a tree; The blue and white signify the river and the shimmering reflections of the sky, while the two colors purportedly give the viewer a clue of the entire sculpture being made of only two branches repeated multiple times.

And while it appears to be imitating nature, the sameness of the dimensions of the branches in a mass conceals which part came first- as opposed to trees in nature, where the bottom is heavier and bigger revealing the bottom branches existing before the top branches to carry the weight (for the earth’s gravity), therefore being able to parent newer and smaller branches that bear smaller twigs and so on. This sculpture paradoxically wants to stop the direction of time (i.e. entropy and the second law of thermodynamics) by stagnant multiplication of the same branches, but by the fake disorderliness of arrangements it mimics entropy in its appearance.

This mimetic tree while it at some level addresses “random fractals” in its self-similarity pattern one finds in Brownian Tree (which happens at the same scale), also flirts with the notion of the theory of entanglement in quantum physics, where subatomic particles can exist in two places at the same time without any cause or signal that connects the two (of course in this case the particles/mass are physically connected)-which leads to multiverse hypothesis; a topic that seems to have propagated outside of scientists’ arena for decades; Neils Bohr’s once stated that science is not a study of nature but study of nature that is available to our observation. I wonder if in fact there were duplication of nature around us that we just may not have the capacity to perceive, and if so, what purpose would they serve, if at all…