The Droste effect is an endless picture-in-picture—a part of the picture contains the whole picture, which contains the picture, which contains the picture, and on.

Most of us are likely familiar with it from the fun visual effect you often see when sharing your screen on a video call, which contains the video call where you're sharing your screen, on which is the video call where... Always entertaining. Google calls it an infinity mirror.

The name derives from a Dutch brand of cocoa powder, Droste, where the classic advert was a picture of a nurse carrying a tray with a box of the cocoa powder, with the picture of the woman on it carrying the tray with a box of the cocoa...

Articles about the Droste effect often mention the amazing M.C. Escher's Print gallery, a picture without beginning or end.

The Droste effect

Ma is the negative space — the space that makes the whole. Formed by the rather beautiful Chinese characters of 'Door' and 'Sun', like the sun gleaming through a doorway, it represents what isn't there and how that helps form what is.

Ma is present in art, including beautiful minimalistic ink brush drawings and music where the silence and quiet that surround the notes help make a piece what it is.

Some vintage-related sketches: figure and ground, use white space with care, John Cage

SP 795 - Ma - smaller.png

Anamorphosis is a type of projection that looks distorted when viewed from a standard vantage point or means but can reveal itself spectacularly from the right point or using the right tool.

This is the technique responsible for making 3D-looking ads on rugby fields that players can run over as if they weren’t there, or how they create those amazing street art holes, or how S L O W painted on a road may look just right when driving towards it but weird and long when seen from the side; or how Hans Holbein the younger tucked a skull into his painting The Ambassadors in the National Gallery. However, others may require viewing with a mirror or a circular viewer to reveal themselves as intended.

Anamorphic art is referred to as intimate art, as even in an art gallery, the true picture may only reveal itself to one person viewing it in just the right way.

P.S. You’ll have to tilt your screen or move to quite an angle to see Tilt Me look like normal letters in the sketch.

Also see: one-point perspective, two-point perspective, 3-point perspective, draw what you see, not what you think, atmospheric perspective.

Anamorphosis

The proportions of the golden ratio pop up in all sorts of places. They are a handy shortcut to make something we seem to innately find pleasingly proportioned. In Nature, the golden spiral abounds across the shell of the nautilus, the spiral of strawberry seeds, the spikes of cacti, and hurricanes. It’s found in the Pyramids and the Parthenon, the Mona Lisa, violins, photography and, very deliberately, in corporate logos. No wonder it’s sometimes called the golden ratio of beauty. There’s a pleasing simplicity to the equation too, where the ratio of the long over the short dimension is the same as both added together over the long dimension.

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Category: art