WebGL2 is unavailable here, so the strip-and-spiral half of the story can't render. The first beats still work — and the full story lives at the explainer.

loading the picture

VI · the spiral

— and the fall becomes the spiral Escher drew.

Now scroll back up to watch it come apart, or bring your own picture.

or drop / paste an image anywhere on this page

open the app · all experiments

How a picture swallows itself

scroll slowly

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I · the picture

This picture holds a copy of itself.

Look closely — inside the marked frame the whole scene appears again, a little smaller.

II · the fall

Zoom in. It repeats forever — every copy dropping straight down.

The classic Droste effect: a rigid, endless fall toward the centre.

III · the logarithm

Take the logarithm and the endless fall flattens into a strip that merely repeats.

Each tile is one level of the fall — diving just slides the wallpaper along.

IV · the lean

Tilt the strip by one precise angle — the angle that makes one repeat meet the next.

For this picture it is ≈ 7.0°, set by how much the copy shrinks.

V · the roll

Roll it back up. The tilt becomes a twist —

watch the strip curl around the blank centre.

05 · all experiments