Recursion and Self-Reference

The definition (876)

Note 876, titled "On recursion", opens:

"The concept of recursion is the structure in which a definition contains as a part a reference to this very whole definition. Think of seeing yourself endlessly reflected by a mirror in front and one behind you, as if you were in a tunnel."

It then makes two claims. Without a halt, recursion does not end: "Unless forcefully brought to a halt, by nature recursive structures tend to be endless. The absence of a stop condition causes values to infinitely self enforce. This Self inflation (or feedback loop) grows out of control and eventually bursts like a bubble." And self-reference shuts out the outside: "The prerequisite of recursion — the demand for self referentiality — immediately also forbids reference to anything outside of itself. This in its turn reveals the true identity of radical autononomy [sic]. It is exclusive and aggressively jealous."

The note ends with a declaration: "(Here we stand and declare all phenomena in life are recursive: everything exists solely through self-definition.)" It passes no judgement on radical autonomy. "Exclusive and aggressively jealous" describes it, and the closing line affirms self-definition as the condition of everything. What the note sets down are two facts about recursive things: they exclude the outside, and they need a halt. The works below are places where the artist decides where the halt falls.

The Related list of 876 ties the definition to particular works and notes: the mise en abyme prints (878), Assemblage (About reviews and press) (851), the Abrons exhibition (729), New and Different (901, the source of the semiotic square), Ethereal Others (When No One is Looking) (854) and About Documentation (992).

Forms recursion takes in the archive

mise en abyme (878)

Seven trapezoidal prints of a grey gallery floor collaged in an overlapping stack on a mint-green ground, framed — *mise en abyme* (c. 2012), prints of a phone photograph, 100 × 70 cm

Note 878 documents the work: "Prints of cell phone photo of white cube gallery floor, arranged according to the Laws of Chance, then aligned. 100 × 70cm." In the frame, seven trapezoidal prints of the one floor photograph overlap in a loose stack on a mint-green ground. The mise en abyme is in the title and the subject: a picture of a gallery floor, made to hang in a gallery.

The procedure quotes Jean Arp. "Arranged according to the Laws of Chance" is the title of his collage of 1916–17, which the vault keeps as 821. A third note, 856, copies the Museum of Modern Art's label for that collage: "The relatively ordered appearance suggests, however, that the artist did not fully relinquish artistic control." The vault links 856 to both 821 and 878, so the remark made about Arp lands on the artist's own chance-then-aligned prints (→ Randomness and Pattern).

The Work = The Work + Its Documentation (992)

Note 992, "About Documentation", reads in full: "What is the Nature? / The Work = The Work + Its Documentation". The work stands on both sides of the equation, so it can only hold if the work already contains its documentation: a recursive definition. The artist filed it that way. The Related list of 992 links 876 and Scroll (336), a Flash piece whose file is named drostescrolls, after the Droste effect. What the formula does in the practice is on Mediation and the Archive.

A sculpture made from its own reviews (Abrons, 2013)

The press release for Release early, release often… (Abrons Arts Center, New York, 2013) says the works "wax upon the notion of recursion and literally recur themselves". A hand drawing from DeviantArt passes through a collage, the lead image of About (Wilkinson, London, 2012) and the reviews of that show, into a screenshot of a review printed on a strip of Plexi and bent into a new sculpture. 876 links that sculpture, Assemblage (About reviews and press) (851: "Digital UV print on hand cut synthetic glass (95 × 95 × 95 cm)"). The full chain is told on Release Early, Release Often (2013).

Senescenence

The press release for Senescenence (Interface Gallery with Nguyen Wahed, New York, 2026) calls the title "an intentional recursive misspelling of 'senescence'" (Senescenence press release). The word repeats a syllable inside itself (→ Senescenence).

Recursive Intervention (2023)

A chrome mirror sphere on a wooden floor in front of tall white shutters — *Recursive Intervention* (2023), ready-made mirroring inflatable, site-specific

harm.work describes Recursive Intervention as "Not so much a sculpture; rather a light, site-specific, observation. The exhibition space and the works in it are reflected by a ready-made mirroring inflatable, causing the space to contain a compressed version of itself." It was shown in Our Inner Child (Upstream Gallery Amsterdam, 2023). In the photograph a chrome sphere stands on the wooden floor and carries the whole room, windows and shutters included, on its surface.

Endless Knot (2025)

Endless knot in grey dotted hatching with lilac bands on a pink field of diagonal stepped lines — *Endless Knot* (2025), plotter drawing, Sakura fineliner on Hahnemühle watercolour paper, 59.4 × 84.1 cm

The knot is drawn in grey dotted hatching with lilac bands, set on a pink field of diagonal stepped lines, with paler yellow-orange bands crossing the lower left. The work-text on harm.work is one sentence: "The endless knot iconography symbolised Samsara i.e., the endless cycle of suffering of birth, death and rebirth within Tibetan Buddhism." The endless knot, one of the Ashtamangala of Tibetan Buddhism, is a closed lattice with no end point, read as saṃsāra, a cycle that cannot be left from inside. The wiki reads it beside 876: the iconographic form of a structure that is "by nature … endless" unless "forcefully brought to a halt". The knot is traditionally drawn on the diagonal, as it is here (→ The Lozenge).

Screen rendering of the endless knot in grey lines on a field of pink stepped lines — *knot.png* (2025), screen rendering, are.na, 24 June 2025

The are.na record dates the drawing and names its line. On 24 June 2025 the artist opened a channel called "Embroidery" Line Algorithm. Its third block is the screen rendering above: the knot in grey on a field of pink stepped lines running along the diagonal. The channel runs the same line over a repeating pattern and a portrait and ends with studio photographs of plotted sheets (25–26 June 2025). The knot belongs to the same spring as Anicca. The Mandala channel has an Anicca 2 work in progress dated 13 April 2025 (block), and in May the artist described Anicca 2 as "A generative two-phase animation, inspired by Buddhist sand drawings, and this one in particular on the Endless Knot symbol" (block). The link between the knot and the mandala is his own (→ Sacred Geometry).

Feedback loops (709)

In his artist statement (709) the feedback loop is a condition of working with complex systems: "Every single parameter depends on all the others, and my interference amplifies as a feedback loop." The output of each step returns as the input of the next. 876 uses the same term for its "Self inflation (or feedback loop)" (→ Subconscious Computation).

The Dissociations vault

Dissociations learned its associations from the artist removing, from each set of three items, the one that belonged least (952; Dissociations). The links it learned are the Related lists of the notes this wiki is built on, so the archive contains the record of the procedure that arranged it (→ About, Protocol, Taste, and Systems).

Stop conditions

876 says recursive structures run on unless "forcefully brought to a halt". The systems the artist describes avoid running forever in two different ways.

The first has no loop that could fail to stop. Writing software that mutates code, he "stumbled upon the notorious halting problem": most mutations "cause infinite loops, stack overflows, rainbow spinners, blue screens of death, and core dumps". Cartesian Genetic Programming, co-developed by Julian F. Miller and Peter Thomson, represents a program as a grid of nodes wired forward only; with it, "I could safely mutate without ever getting stuck in an infinite loop" (Miller interview). The graph has no cycles, so the halting problem never arises (→ Evolutionary Logic).

The second has a halt set by a parameter. Speaking with Jenna Sutela about DNA as a compressed program, he says: "If a gene makes a leaf get smaller and smaller at each iteration, at some point the program decides to stop making leaves, because they are too small to be practical" (HVDD × Sutela). This is recursion in the sense of 876, halted from inside by a threshold.

Stained Unravel does something else again: when its cellular automaton reaches equilibrium, the rules are reconfigured and the run continues under new ones (→ Stained Unravel).