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For many years I contemplated the nature of the particular mobile structure that I have been working with since 1970 and known that somehow they illustrate a mathematical principle. Not being a mathematician I didn't know what that principle might be but only that it was there, and indeed, when I first started making these mobiles, the winglike ones, the principle was unknown; no one had yet thought it. Finally a man named Mandelbrot tuned in to what I had seen and came up with Fractal Geometry. I doubt that he ever saw one of my mobiles. I had known both for years and not put them together, probably because I didn't understand what fractal geometry is, but eventually I put the two, the mobiles and the concept, together.

Fractal Geometry is a mathematics of permutation: each operation is the result of what has gone before. It begins with a simple formula, in the case of the mobile it is a curved line at an angle to the force of gravity, just what that angle is determines where it will go from there. Once that angle is decided there is very little more choice in where it will lead, of course the choices that one does make are extremely important. The next line will either converge or depart at a tangent or intersect the first line, these are the choices, from there it is simply a matter of deciding when to stop. In the case of fractals it doesn't stop and in a way the mobile also goes out to infinity when we allow the imagination to carry it there. Infinity is one of those things peculiar to human thought; a purely mathematical concept that can only be experienced with the imagination. The mobile is a machine to boost the imagination into another plane where infinity and space become the atmosphere in which we ourselves move, free of gravity and of the human condition that limits us to inhabiting only the lowest few meters of space on the surface of our earth. With our bodies we can only go a few steps up or down from that surface. The farthest anyone has gone beyond that surface as of 2005 is only thirty-five earth diameters and that at enormous expense and risk. Anyone with the vehicle of the mind can travel anywhere without cost or risk. This is the objective of the mobile

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