Escher's Profile

M.C. Escher experimented with different ways of showing infinity in three dimensions. He decided that tiling the surface of a sphere to form a continuous, three-dimensional tessellation was the most perfect way to express infinity, but he knew that there was no way to bend a flat piece of paper into a sphere. He knew it was possible to bend a piece of paper into a cylinder and join the ends to form a seamless tessellation, but because the surface would be artificially joined, it would not be truly a continuous surface. A cylindrical mirror provides a way of bending the picture plane similar to the method described by Escher. By using anamorphic techniques, it is possible to form a continuous infinite image in three dimensions without changing the shape of the paper. The cylindrical anamorphosis shown here is based on a photograph of Escher looking at his own reflection in a spherical mirror.