I love recursion. There's something about the way it invokes infinity that makes my head spin. Droste effect images are recursive images that got their name from a Dutch company that makes chocolates and cocoa and things like that.
Their cocoa packaging used to feature a nurse holding a tray with a packet of Droste cocoa on it. Of course, that packet also had a nurse holding a tray with a packet of Droste cocoa on it and so on.
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If you catch yourself between two mirrors you'll see a similar effect:
Yes I do own the Mona Lisa. I like the double repetition in this shot that comes from the screen at the back of the camera.
It's not quite the Droste effect because with mirrors the repeating patter will always eventually disappear out of frame and there'll be no more repetition.
You can make a great Droste effect using remote support software - the type of software that allows you to see someone's computer desktop over the internet. To get the Droste effect just connect up to your own desktop. Here I've used a program called LogMeIn which is very very good!
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That's a 'naturally occurring' Droste effect but to create my blackberry wallpaper I needed to use a bit of photoshop:
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In the last two pictures each repetition is nested entirely within its parent. But a much cooler effect is the one at the lop of this post where each repetition blends seamlessly from its parent in a continuous spiral. I made that image in GIMP which is an open source alternative to photoshop.
Here's the guide to using GIMP to create a continuous Droste effect. It utilises a plugin called mathmap that allows you to do crazy mathematical things to your images.
A couple more Droste effect images from my past to round off this post...
Mould & Arrowsmith recursion
I write and perform sketches with my comedy partner Gemma Arrowsmith. Our show at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival in 2008 had a bit of image recursion in it and it was all to do with PowerPoint...
When you finish a PowerPoint presentation it drops you out to a list of slides with the last slide in the main editing area, like this:
In our case the last slide was a screen grab of the final few pages of the scrip for the show! But in fact, that wasn't really the last slide, it was just another PowerPoint slide made to look like we'd reached the end of the presentation. That became clear when we really did get to the end, like this:
But of course that wasn't the real end of the presentation either. The more Gemma tried to get to the end the worse it got:
This was the design of one of the promotional badges for that year's show:
Do you have any favourite examples for recursion? Let me know in the comments.
