Recursion as a Creative Strategy

As I have been working on music for The Rings of Saturn, I have been reflexively exploring visual elements. In the book, the narrator walks through several towns in East Anglia, having various reveries along the way. The book includes the author's own photographs, but I have made my own collection and processed them through Adobe After Effects.

In the software, you can endlessly nest elements inside other elements (essentially the Droste effect). In this case, series of images on the walking paths, are reversed and superimposed, such that images 1-12 and 12-1 are overlaid, as a kind of loop, or to use an appropriate metaphor from the book, a labyrinth.

I frequently do this after I've finished a piece, where I isolate 2-3 lines, then add others. If you keep doing this recycle, the results can be very different. Sometimes I'll do this with music with lyrics, or music set to poetry, then place new words in place of the original words. The original then serves to set the tempo and rhythms where they might not have been realized initially.

The image above is recursion used in the Ummagumma album cover. But the music wasn't recursive, at least that which is apparent in the final mix, but the visual ideas may have in fact influenced the music. Remix  is all about recursion as a default strategy, and the Droste effect is lost. (The placement album cover of Gigi in the album art is probably random, but may have significance, but sends the reader down the rabbit hole, as the narrator does in The Rings.)