Much can probably be said about the inclusion of a reference to Magritte's famous self-referential pipe series in an ARG.
I have included below some comments on Hofstadter's views of these works which I discovered when reading "Godel, Escher, Bach an Eternal Golden Braid" many years ago.
"Could it be that we can know something about this larger system, such as that it must be more complex than our own world? These are the types of philosophical questions that reading GEB evoked, and they are reflected in some of Magritte's pipe series that Hofstadter includes—for example, a painting of a pipe with the caption "Ceci n'est pas un pipe," i.e. "This is not a pipe." At first we may think, 'of course it's a pipe,' until we realize that what Magritte means is that it is really just a painting. Another painting features a room with the painting of the first pipe on an easel and a "real" pipe floating above it—now there are three layers of "reality" evident: our world, the world of the painting, and the world of the painting within the painting. It forces the viewer to confront the subjective nature of reality—do we necessarily exist in the 'highest' layer?"
http://serendip.brynmawr.edu/complexity ... ohwer.html
"Hofstadter (1980, Chapter XX Strange Loops, Or Tangled Hierarchies) Of all these artists, Magritte was the most conscious of the symbol-object mystery (which I see as a deep extension of the use-mention distinction). (p.700) ... Magritte's series of pipe paintings is fascinating and perplexing. (p.701) ... The only way not to get sucked in is to see both pipes merely as colored smudges on a surface a few inches in front of your nose. Then, and only then, do you appreciate the full meaning of the written message "Ceci n'est pas une pipe" - but ironically, at the very instant everything turns into smudges, the writng too turns to smudges, thereby losing its meaning! In other words, at that instant, the verbal message of the painting self-destructs in a most Godelian way. (p.701) "
http://homepages.which.net/~gk.sherman/baaaaabk.htm
"Magritte was telling the viewer that the lithographed print of a pipe is not actually a real pipe; hence the consideration of not what youíre looking at within the context of the frame, but what the object really is, a lithographed print!"
http://web.cfa.arizona.edu/art432a/fall2003/work.htmlYou are in an open field west of a big white house with a boarded front door.
There is a small mailbox here.
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