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MAX. “Who are YOU looking at?!” Andrew. “Who are you and what are you doing with that camera closeup?”

Ukachi. “Oh, no. Don’t you DARE-!” Ann. “It’s all right. Take the picture.”

All five Clips

And two more pictures!

If you look closely, the picture at the right has five red points, one of which is obscured by the white shape. That picture on the right is the output of a system that has a period of five. On the other hand, the picture on the right has a period of eight. It might not be quite visible, but there are eight points in an octagonal shape inside the white disk.

In other words... video feedback creates a mathematical system which can have many different periods depending on the way it is created! Amazing, isn’t it?!

So, here’s how Video Feedback works. :P

Video Feedback is quite similar to a mathematical equation, but is expressed visually.

The base “equation” is the monitor screen, which is given an input through the camera. This input then is processed through the “equation” and the result is the frame at that moment on the monitor.

This happens many times each second, giving different results/frames every time the equation finishes calculating the answer.

This is where the fun stuff happens. By moving the camera certain ways (rotating, zooming, moving) and using other objects to add other effects (mirrors, glass, etc), the equation strays from its original pattern as very strange types of input are given to it in order to calculate an answer.

This is where this process turns into something similar to a Mandelbrot Set. The new inputs can eventually lead to a loop which creates patterns that have angular symmetry. In other words, the process creates a visual answer which has a certain period in which the answers repeat. The visual result? See the following pictures!

(Quoted from the Presentation, which can be downloaded below)

The Physics Presentation