Tuesday, January 06, 2004

Sit back and watch the blinkenlights

About 15 years ago my friend Sandro and I, with the help of a number of other friends, made some weird videos by pointing a video camera at the television that was displaying the camera's output. This formed a feedback loop that created psychedelic patterns. We found that we could manipulate the patterns by holding a mirror in front of the screen and aiming the camera near the juncture of screen and mirror. I think it is safe to assume that we all had a lot more spare time in those days...

Fortunately, there are a bunch of other people who have a lot of spare time, in addition to which they have something we didn't have back then: webpages on which to show their video art. Some of them also have quite a bit of chaos theory and nonlinear dynamics and iterated functions and fractal math to describe what's going on. Check them out at The Ultimate Video Feedback Page.