Our next stop in Den Haag was the 18th-century Lange Voorhout Palace, the small, elegant home to the works of the renowned Dutch graphic artist, Maurits Cornelis Escher, better known simply as M.C. Escher. Dave and I have always been interested in the recursive quality of many of Escher’s works, such as “Drawing Hands”, “Waterfall”, and “Ascending and Descending”. In programming, recursion is when a function or procedure calls itself, possibly resulting in an infinite loop. The same principle is exemplified in these works of Escher’s, where a principle subject in a drawing is defined in terms of itself, and you cannot tell where one thing begins and another ends, resulting in an infinite loop.
The finalé of our visit led us to the “Room of Escher”, where we donned virtual reality headsets which enabled us to imagine that we were actually moving through one of Escher’s 3-dimensional works.
It's great to finally know what the M.C. stands for in M.C. Escher!
Posted by: Bob | Wednesday, 22 March 2006 at 06:00 AM