What happens when you take a photo of a photo over and over again, recursively?

Memory as Recursion

A 2012 Northwestern study investigating memory concluded that memory is like the telephone game.

When you remember something, you’re actually not recalling the original event. Instead, you’re remembering what you remembered from your last recall of this memory.

What does this mean for memory? Not only does it explain a cause of false memories, but this phenomenon can be helpful in treating patients with PTSD, which allows memories to be “adjusted” by healthcare professionals.

When you remember something, you’re actually remembering the last time you remembered it.

As I thought about this more, I wondered — what actually happens when you remember a memory over and over and over again, recursively? What does that memory become? Do the forces of entropy and chaos reduce the memory to an empty void? Or, since memories are always filtered through your brain, perhaps your personality, internal beliefs, and worldview tint the memory, making it uniquely yours.

The Experiment: Photos of Photos

I wanted to investigate this recursive phenomenon more. A friend showed me Alvin Lucier’s “I Am Sitting in a Room”, an audio clip of a recording of a recording of a recording, etc. which ultimately reduces the entire audio to the room’s resonant harmonies.

Then I thought of a visual analogy: taking a picture of a picture, over and over again, and observing the result. Below is the photoshoot for a picture of Ted & Wally’s ice cream taken in Omaha, NE:

How is this filmed?

I used my iPhone 6s Plus to take the pictures, and my MacBook Pro 15" with Retina Display for displaying the rendered images. I mounted the iPhone with the Zilu Universal Car Phone Mount on a rotating small mirror to precisely adjust the positioning.

After taking a picture with my iPhone, IFTTT (link to the specific applet) automatically backed up the photos to a specific Google Drive folder, which I then opened on my computer to take the next picture.

Why does the image mutate?

When each photo is taken, small perturbations slightly mutate the image:

Colors: The colors eventually trend toward RGB values due to the pixels in the computer screen.
Human Error: It was a challenge to get the camera aligned with the image, and slight shifts would compound over time.
Brightness: The iPhone camera auto-calibrates brightness, darkening or brightening parts of the image.
Stripes/dotting: Pixelation or stripes from the computer screen are introduced into the photo.
Glare: Light reflects off the monitor, adding a fuzzy effect each round.
Miscellaneous: Dust on the screen, jitters while pressing the shutter, or a stray ray of sunshine—anything could affect the image.

So, what do the results mean?

This experiment is obviously not an accurate representation of how the brain processes memories, but it’s a compelling investigation into the mutating forces of recursion and entropy.

It’s beautiful and fascinating to see the RGB colors of the computer screen come to life in the imagery, and the transformation into abstract blobs is mesmerizing. For me, it’s a reminder that despite the “destructive” nature of entropy, there’s beauty in chaos.

The magnification of even the slightest perturbations was remarkable. In this photoshoot, my camera was slightly tilted, so the left side of the image kept getting cut off. Over time, this compounded until the whole subject of the photo shifted. The same thing can happen in memories — a subtle negative thought or suspicion can compound, consuming the memory itself.

What other natural processes could this recursive photography symbolize?

When oral history is told from one storyteller to the next, how does the history change?
When cultures reinterpret religious texts from one generation to the next, do they reflect more and more of the culture itself?
What happens when you translate a story from English to Spanish, then back to English, then back to Spanish?
Perhaps even the force of evolution can be considered a form of recursion.

Other Objects: My Face

I was curious to check out this effect on other types of subjects. I noticed that the colors still strongly trend toward RGB values. Quite fascinating to see my own face morph into a beautiful array of colors.

Other Objects: Hand Soap

In this example, I really wanted to investigate the final equilibrium of the photo — does it ever reach a point where it stops changing? This photoshoot took the longest, but I eventually got to a point where I viewed a plain blue screen, which, after several photos, stopped changing.

What is the “final equilibrium” of our memories?

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