I find Ursus Wehrli's images beautiful but grotesque.

He takes organic, emergent phenomena and then tidies them up.

For example, a sprig of a pine tree branch is decomposed into the individual straight twigs, sorted by length, and the individual needles laid out side by side.

A thing that occurs to me looking at it: the structure matters more than the details, but summary statistics don't capture the structure.

This is one of the reasons that complex systems are so hard to grok.

Our reductionist tools are great for sorting similar things into buckets and counting.

But when you take a thing and put it into a bucket, you remove it from its context.

And context changes everything.