The Infinitely Recurring JPG

This is 'recursion', the end result of a recent digital performance by the artist Michael Szpakowski, and it's currently my favorite image on Flickr. It's simple and clever, but to bloggers and other digital denizens, it speaks volumes about the way we see and feel the internet.

"I love Flickr and I use it a lot (despite some reservations about Yahoo's handling of the site); it just occurred to me I could do a little online performance which involved repeatedly taking a screenshot of an image & replacing the current image with that screenshot," Szpakowski told me in an email. "I don't know whether anyone actually witnessed the performance but I quite like the outcome."

Think of it as a window into the never-endingness of our browser activity.

As a dutiful member of the modern, bleary-eyed masses, I've been blogging and editing online for years now, and recurrence and repetition are modes I know all too well. There's no better venue better suited to either than Flickr, either; home of the crucial Creative Commons image. The ritual, you bloggers know, goes like this: Search Flickr, download image, resize, upload on your blog, repeat. Recur.

Szpakowski's image captures the essence of that recurrent mundanity and lays it out on the visual plane; digital recursion turns out to be an ideal foil for online repetition. There's something simple and true about the way it represents the visualized internet, too. It's just jpgs, all the way down.