WINFRIED PLATZGUMMER - Oroboros in Thermodynamics (MiPArt terrass, left) and HARALD KIRCHEBNER - Open door to OROBOROS (MiPArt-Gallery entrance, right)

• OROBOROS - the logo of OROBOROS INSTRUMENT
• Oroboros - Open door to MiPArt and Archetypical symbol

From: Abraham Eleazar (1760) Uraltes chymisches Werk. 2nd ed., Leipzig.

J.M. Shick [shick@maine.edu] - Malcolm: Thank you for sending me this fabulous picture (December 27, 2006).

From: Olaf Breidbach (2006) "Visions of Nature: The Art and Science of Ernst Haeckel" . Prestel, Munich, Berlin, London, New York, page 52.

M. C. Escher: Dragon (wood-engraving, 1952). 'However much this dragon tries to be spatial, he remains completely flat. Two incisions are made in the paper on which he is printed. Then it is folded in such a way as to leave two square openings. But this dragon is an obstinate beast, and in spite of his two dimensions he persists in assuming that he has three; so he sticks his head through one of the holes and his tail through the other.'

'Lady Lovelace, no less than Babbage, was profoundly aware that with the invention of the Analytical Engine, mankind was flirting with mechanized intelligence - particularly if the Engine were capable of "eating its own tail" (the way Babbage described the Strange Loop created when a machine reaches in and alters its own stored program). In an 1842 memoir, she wrote that the A.E. "might act upon other things besides number". While Babbage dreamt of creating a chess or tic-tac-toe automaton, she suggested that his Engine, with pitches and harmonies coded into its spinning cylinders, "might compose elaborate and scientific pieces of music of any degree of commplexity or extent."'

Douglas R. Hofstadter (1979) Gödel, Escher. Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid. A Metaphorical Fugue on Minds and Machines in the Spirit of Lewis Carroll. The Harvester Press.