The Droste effect known as mise en abyme in art is the effect of a picture appearing within itself, in a place where a similar picture would realistically be expected to appear.
 |
| Droste cocoa advertisment, 1904 (photo: Wikipedia) |
The appearance is recursive: the smaller version contains an even smaller version of the picture, and so on. Only in theory could this go on forever; practically, it continues only as long as the resolution of the picture allows, which is relatively short, since each iteration geometrically reduces the picture's size. It is a visual example of a strange loop, a self-referential system of instancing which is the cornerstone of fractal geometry.
 |
| Experimenting with the various settings of my laptops integrated camera, I pointed the screen to a mirror displaying the recursive loop of image play/feedback. |
No comments:
Post a Comment