The Droste Effect

If you live long enough--and boy, have I!--eventually many, if not most, of your questions about life are answered. Or you get so darned old that you no longer remember those questions. At age almost 70, I have learned the following:

Q: When will I forget my phone? 

A: When my car breaks down on a remote road, at midnight. In the rain. Or I’ll have my phone, but the battery will be dead.

 

Q: What guarantees my developing a significant coughing, sneezing, really yucko cold? 

A: Having tickets to a chamber music concert on Saturday (rock concert in a stadium? No one would hear me hacking, so I will remain healthy.) 

 

Q: How will I regain the weight I just lost? 

A: I will merely glance at cake and pie photos in Bon Appetit, or smell the pizzas being churned out as I pass Rosarios. Or wait two days after I have gone down a size and bought a new dress. Bingo! +10 lbs.!

 

Here’s another mystery solved: 

I went many decades before learning the term for an image that duplicates itself, getting smaller and smaller, to infinity.  Several of M.C. Escher’s artworks utilize this device, RECURSIVITY, as the staircase in the mirror reflects a smaller staircase in a smaller mirror, ad nauseum. Ditto two advertisements, lest you think I’ve become too highbrow for this blog. In one, for Land O’Lakes butter, a lovely Native woman holds a box of butter with the image of the woman and butter replicating until the size is so small as to be undetectable. And in the logo for Laughing Cow cheese, the cow’s ear tags are images that repeat, on and on and on. 

 

Other examples can be found in the works of Salvador Dali, and even medieval triptychs, so the fact that this visual phenomenon is familiarly called The Droste Effect does NOT mean that the Dutch chocolate package designers came up with this on their own. But that image from the cocoa box WAS my first exposure to it, and now I’m finding it popping up all over. A Pink Floyd album cover (Ummagumma). The Mel Brooks classic movie Spaceballs. Queen’s Bohemian Rhapsody music video. 

 

WHOA! WHOA! whoa! whoa!  (and so forth)

 

Fractals are another, more scholarly example. These replicating patterns are seen in nature in ferns, nautilus shells, the bronchioles in the human lung, a snowflake, and the Milky Way. 

 

Scientists believe that the reason fractals draw us in, is that the brain treats each copy-within-a-copy as both an independent image and part of a larger whole. It can feel like you’re in the middle of an optical puzzle. Which image came first? Are they getting bigger, or smaller?

 

I personally love them because they remind me of our beautiful interconnectedness. We are, at our core, all of us made of star stuff, and therefore we have within us, multitudes. 

 

A lofty thought.

 

But I confess, there’s another, more honest, reason that I love the Droste Effect.

 

It’s great with marshmallows. 

image by Yuriy Vertikov on Unsplash