Many of the Same Thing

A single roof tile is a tile. Forty of them become a surface, and the eye gives up reading them one at a time. That is the trick repetition plays: it converts objects into texture — mooring posts along a pier, furrows in a ploughed field, birds spaced evenly on a wire, windows stacked up the side of a building.

Then it does the opposite. Once the pattern holds, attention starts looking for the exception: the tile that slipped, the bird facing the wrong way, the furrow that bends around a stone. A field of perfect repetition is restful and slightly dull; one break is usually all it takes to make it a photograph rather than a sample.

On a desktop this kind of image behaves unusually well. There is no single focal point to argue with your icons, and it survives being covered — crop a repeating field in half and it is still the same field. Few pictures can lose a third of themselves to a taskbar and lose nothing.