Mise en abyme

A common sense of the phrase is the visual experience of standing between two mirrors and seeing an infinite reproduction of one's image.

It described a coat of arms that appears as a smaller shield in the center of a larger one (see Droste effect).

While art historians working on the early-modern period adopted this phrase and interpreted it as showing artistic "self-awareness", medievalists tended not to use it.

[citation needed] Many examples, however, can be found in the pre-modern era, as in a mosaic from the Hagia Sophia dated to the year 944.

[5] In Western art history, mise en abyme is a formal technique in which an image contains a smaller copy of itself, in a sequence appearing to recur infinitely; "recursion" is another term for this.

This use of the phrase mise en abyme was picked up by scholars and popularized in the 1977 book Le récit spéculaire.

[6] Mise en abyme occurs in a text when there is a reduplication of images or concepts referring to the textual whole.

Activities similar to dreaming, such as unconsciousness and virtual reality, also are described as mise en abyme.

In comedy, the final act of The Inside Outtakes (2022) by Bo Burnham contains a chapter titled "Mise en abyme".