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[Sarah Sze: "Measuring Stick"]

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[VOICEOVER FROM FILM] We begin with a scene one-meter wide,

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which we view from just one meter away.

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Now, every ten seconds, we will look from[br]ten times father away

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and our field of view will be ten times wider.

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[SZE] In the Seventies, Charles and Ray Eames's[br]"Powers of Ten"

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was the classic idea of a film

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that could measure time and space.

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That was something I always looked forward to seeing.

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So, I wanted to make a work that was about

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the measurement of time and space through[br]the moving image.

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Everything in it is actually very much about

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some kind of measuring stick

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for how we orient ourselves in time and space.

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I had been working on it as a film,

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but I hadn't pulled up the volume on what[br]was it doing as a sculpture.

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And I realized that, as a sculpture,

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it needed to act more like this kind of fleeting image--

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and it had to become more diaphanous,

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it had to become more fractured,

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it had to become much more light

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and sort of defy gravity.

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So the screens went away and they just became[br]pieces of paper.

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And the top of the desk, I made a mirror.

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This is actually, in some ways,

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a replica of an editing desk.

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I was thinking about the idea of scientist[br]image makers.

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With the cheetah, I wanted to reference Muybridge.

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And then I was thinking about Edgerton,

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who created the strobe.

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We take for granted,

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they're really like scientific experiments[br]with images.

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If you spend enough time with the piece,

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you realize this isn't just a video.

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It's actually live information coming to you[br]from the NASA site.

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You see the distance to the Voyager

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and it's the farthest measurable distance

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that we have ever been able to measure.

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Every object that's on the desk

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is one of the objects that's being exploded.

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So it has this quality of an experimental site.

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You know, this idea of a model that's a scientific[br]model--

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something that tries to actually measure a[br]kind of behavior,

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I think, is something that I try and do in[br]the sculpture.

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To have these extreme scale shifts in the[br]experience

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in a very close proximity,

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that is actually the way we perceive things.

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I'm trying to do that constantly throughout.

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It's such a volatile experience in every way

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that things are teeter-tottering--

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that you're constantly trying to find your balance.