Droste

Droste (pronounced dross-tee)

(1) A surname of Germanic origin.

(2) An object displaying the Droste effect.

1904: The Droset effect is named after an image of a nurse carrying a serving tray with a cup of hot chocolate and the box, the image thus replicating.  The Droste brand was from the Netherlands and was founded in 1863 by Gerardus Johannes Droste (1836-1923), the image was designed by Jan Musset (1861–1931.  The packaging of the cocoa powder was first used in 1904.  The surname’s origin was in the German province of Westphalia, the name derived from the Old German drotsete, derived from the elements truth (body of servants) and sizzen (to preside).  The surname Droste thus denotes a head servant or steward, in charge of a nobleman's household servants.  The first known instance of the name appearing in records was found in Schweinheim, Westphalia in 1335.  The variations in the spelling of the name included Droste, Drost, Droz, Drossate, Drossaerd, Drossärd, Drossart and others.  Droste is a proper noun, a noun and an an adjective; the noun plural is Drostes.

A box of Droste cocoa powder, which demonstrates the effect to which it lent the name.

In French, the equivalent term is mise-en-abyme (plural mise en abymes or mises en abyme), (literally “placement into abyss”).  Long familiar in art and advertising, it was first used as device of literary criticism by the French author André Gide (1869–1951), whose output was varied but in the field of literary criticism was usually comprehendible, unlike some of what would later emerge from Paris.  His private (in his case a relative term) life was less admired.  In literature, the expression of the idea varies from introspection to the interpolation of a version of the work into the work itself; a story within a story.  In its more arcane interpretations, it’s used in deconstructive literary criticism to explore the inter-textual consequences of language (language abstracted from the constructed “reality” of the text).

A visual representation of the original Droste in an infinite loop (choose loop option to run).  Depending on how one defines infinity, an actual Droste probably can’t exist because at some point the light reflecting to define the image would become a single photon and because light cannot be smaller than a photon, the loop must stop.  It can however be described to the point where the loop tends toward infinity because whatever the visual dimension might be, descriptively it can (as a mathematical expression) be halved.  Infinity itself, although it probably doesn’t exist, can also be described although perhaps not as an equation.

London based art design group Hipgnosis played with the idea for the album cover for Pink Floyd's Ummagumma (1969).

Gide was unusually helpful (compared by later French theorists) in provide explanations which could be understood and were genuinely deconstructive in a useful way.  He made clear for example that his allusion to the Droste effect in the visual arts (infinite regression of form) did not imply a direct application of the concept to literature; he was discussing the use of the representation of a work within a work and makes the point that pure regression within something like a novel would be an absurd loop.  Instead, his conception was of structural elements of a novel appearing within the text as a way a author can construct meaning by creating or resolving conflict.

In computing, the mechanics of the idea is expressed as a quine (a computer with no dependence of user (or third-party) input, the only output of which is a replicated copy of its own source code).  Usually called, "a self-replicating program", quine was coined by US physicist Douglas Hofstadter (b 1945) and appeared first in his book Gödel, Escher, Bach: an Eternal Golden Braid (1979) in honor of US philosopher Willard Van Orman Quine (1908–2000) who wrote widely about indirect self-reference.  Hofstadter’s core concept in Gödel, Escher, Bach is elusive but is probably best understood as revolving around the interplay of loops in the mathematical structures in art, music and language.  It is not an easy read.