tententoon↗ Studies in infinity / 02 Make a spiral

A picture. A smaller picture. A strange idea.

There is no
last picture.

Some pictures contain themselves.
Give that simple idea a turn, and
something extraordinary happens.

Take it apart Know the idea? Go straight to the twist ↗
Opening the gallery…
ONE ROOM / NO END
THE PICTURE, TAKEN APART

Five small moves. You can touch every one.

01 / 05A picture inside a picture
Preparing the picture…

The little frame is where the whole picture goes.

01 A SIMPLE RECIPE

Put the room
inside the room.

There’s an empty frame on the wall. Fill it with a smaller copy of this entire picture.

That copy has a frame, too. Put another copy there. And another. The rule can keep going forever, even when the copies become too small to see.

This is the Droste effect: a picture that contains a smaller version of itself.

Just the roomEight rooms deep

02 A DIFFERENT KIND OF DISTANCE

Give every size
the same space.

Each copy takes up less room than the last. To see the pattern, we need a different map.

Measure distance from the centre on a logarithmic scale: shrinking by the same factor now moves the same distance. Walk around the centre, and you move in the other direction.

As you scroll, the nested picture opens into a repeating strip. Zooming in becomes sliding along it.

100%42%18%7%

Equal steps in scale. Equal steps on the strip.

This copyThe next copy

03 THE SMALL MOVE THAT CHANGES EVERYTHING

Let a turn
change the scale.

In the original picture, going once around the centre brings you straight back to where you started.

Now tilt the strip. Arrange it so that one full turn also takes you to the next, smaller copy. Going around and going inward become part of the same journey.

The angle comes from the size of the inner frame. For this picture, it’s about 8°.

No tiltOne copy per turn

04 BACK INTO THE PICTURE

Roll it back up.
Keep the tilt.

Return from the flat map to the picture. Positions around the strip become angles again; positions along it become distances from the centre.

But we’ve changed how those directions fit together. The picture now gets smaller as it turns.

That small tilt opens up into a spiral.

Flat stripSpiral

05 AN END THAT IS A BEGINNING

You have been
here before.

Follow the picture inward. The room appears again, smaller and turned. Keep going, and it appears again.

This is a tententoon: the same picture, with the same rule, spiralling through another scale.

There is no last picture.
Just another way in.

HereHere, again

NOW MAKE THE IDEA YOURS

What’s inside
your picture?

Choose an image. Mark the frame where it should repeat. Watch it become something you couldn’t have drawn.

Make your own spiral

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