User:Cyclopia/Infinite loop motif

thumb|upright|[[Drawing Hands by M. C. Escher]]

An infinite loop motif is an artistic technique used to produce a work or element of a work that appears to have no discernable beginning or end. Such artworks typically are songs, images, or stories. Examples of this motif can be found in music that naturally repeats, or in images that are images of themselves. The works of M. C. Escher are exemplary of this motif.

Techniques that artists use to implement the infinite loop motif include cycles, recursion and self-reference.

Artistic implementations of the infinite loop motif can often result in paradoxes. The paradoxical nature of such works can make them interesting, amusing, and even perplexing to produce and contemplate.

Types of infinite loop motifs


There are three main types of infinite loop motifs: infinite cycles, infinite recursion, and self-reference.

Infinite cycles
An infinite cycle is a technique in which the end of a work or an element of the work refers to its own beginning, and can thus repeat indefinitely. This is a popular motif in music, in which lyrics and melody repeat themselves and never reach a natural stopping point. Examples can be found in the children's songs The Song That Never Ends, John Jacob Jingleheimer Schmidt, There's a Hole in My Bucket, and Who Stole the Cookie from the Cookie Jar?. An example in advertising can be found in an early jingle for Pepsi Cola.

In fiction, Eric Rücker Eddison's fantasy novel The Worm Ouroboros implements an infinite cycle by making the situation at the end of the novel equal to that at the beginning, and by making the first and last paragraphs identical. The title and cover art of the novel, Ouroboros, provide more examples of the motif. James Joyce's novel Finnegans Wake starts in mid-sentence, the beginning of which is found in the novel's last sentence, thus making the novel infinitely cyclic.

Infinite cycles are popular in works concerning time travel, in which the origin of an event or object becomes paradoxical. For example, a man traveling back in time could become his own ancestor, thereby making his origin impossible to determine. A classic example is the science fiction story By His Bootstraps by Robert A. Heinlein.

Infinite recursion
Infinite recursion is a technique in which a work or an element of the work recurrs within itself. This motif is sometimes referred to as the Droste effect. Recursion is a term commonly encountered in the field of computer science.

This motif is popular in images, where the image is also an element of the image. Popular examples include the Land O'Lakes butter packaging logo, the cover illustration for the Pink Floyd album Ummagumma and the portrait of Stephen Colbert on The Colbert Report television show. Another example is the Matryoshka doll.

Self-reference
Self-reference is a technique in which a work or an element of the work refers to itself. This motif is ancient, with examples from Ancient Egypt, China and Greece, among others. Examples of this motif include Drawing Hands by M. C. Escher, and the Ouroboros. An example in fiction is the TV series Bones, in which the fictional protagonist of the show writes novels, the protagonist of which is the real-life author of the novels in which the fictional Bones was created.