M C Eshers iphone

Jul 22, 2010

The artist MC Esher didn’t own an iPhone of course (he died in 1972) but if he had he would no doubt have had iDroste as one of his iPhone apps!

The ‘droste’ in ‘iDroste’ refers to the ‘droste effect’ which is a kind of recursive picture i.e. a picture within a picture within a picture ad infinitum! Its not unlike the weird sensation you get looking into mirror facing a mirror and watching your reflection repeat and disappear to infinity!

Droste gets its name from a Dutch company that produced a hot chocolate drink in the early 1900′s (known as Droste) that featured a recursive image on it’s packaging and the name eventually came to mean any such recursive imagery.

Droste is also a visual example of what is known in fractal geometry as a strange loop! This is a self-referential system as shown in fractal imagery which has helped to popularise chaos theory.

iDroste application for the iPhone

iDroste app allows you to turn your photos into droste images.

The app has sliders allowing you to adjust the spirals and repeat rate amongst other features. There are pre loaded images the app includes but its much more fun to choose your own and save the pictures to your Camera Roll.

As the app is only 99c  (59p) its well worth investing in if you like odd photographic effects.

Heres a recursive image I created of myself with the app:

Escher’s Droste Effect Group on Flickr features some great examples of idroste and droste images so be sure to visit here for more droste inspiration.

As you can see from his work Esher was fond of using such recursive imagery in his art:

Get iDroste from iTunes store here