"I have unironically spent hours playing this game"

November 23, 2024 6:14 PM

What this thing is, is an artifact of the sharpening that these apply to the video, where there can become sort of ripples in high-contrast areas. And when you point a camcorder at a TV, there is a lot of high contrast going on. It creates almost terrain-like structures, and if you hold the camera at the right angle, it sort of looks like you're flying through them. It's like a flight simulator, and it's really neat and very weird [...] So yeah, just turn on the TV, make sure it's on the right channel and junk, and then just point your camcorder at the TV, and you'll get a magical game.

YouTuber @DeclanDoesCameraThings explains how to turn a vintage camcorder into a hypnotic makeshift fractal flight simulator.

More:

12 minutes of flight through fractals

Flying through the void, infinite tunnels, and more with my 90s camera

Adding magnets to my fractal flight sim!

posted by Rhaomi (13 comments total)

The general name for this is "video feedback" and it can get trippy and complex.
posted by BungaDunga at 7:49 PM on November 23 [4 favorites]

Perhaps the most famous sequence created using this technique.
posted by jabah at 8:36 PM on November 23 [10 favorites]

Curiously this concept (a video camera pointed at a screen) forms the core of Hofstadter's [0] "I am a Strange Loop". My read on that book is that the loss of his wife broke his mind, and that the book was a view into how he rebuilt it. It's quite the curiosity if you're curious.

[0] most famous for Goedel, Escher, Bach, which formed a core component of some modern techno utopian thinking.
posted by constraint at 11:09 PM on November 23 [4 favorites]

I feel like there's a whole section in Godel Escher Bach about this as well. I'm not sure if fractal is the right term, but it has some similarities to them

I figured this would be a younger guy doing video feedback from the description, him saying it was the only camera with a line out makes sense though.
posted by lkc at 12:21 AM on November 24

The Light Herder by Dave Blair is a more mechanically complex version that produces very fractal fractals.
posted by autopilot at 12:58 AM on November 24 [3 favorites]

I figured this would be a younger guy doing video feedback from the description, him saying it was the only camera with a line out makes sense though.

I'm fairly sure any camcorder, digicam or phone that comes with a video-out cable (usually the octopus one with a yellow cinch plug on one of its tentacles) will do, or can stream live video over USB or WiFi, but the older the camera is, the trippier it tends to get. Especially cameras with imaging tubes like a vidicon or plumbicon. Two factors are at play here, the overall delay in getting the picture from the camera to the display, and the image remanence both in the imaging tube and the display.

During the setup or teardown of a video festival in the 1980's I played with this a bit, but it's probably as old as the first television experiments.
posted by Stoneshop at 5:37 AM on November 24

Though I spent countless hours on LSD in the middle of the night at Walmart as a teenager, pointing the display camcorder at the TV, I never got this deep. I have a feeling that if I have inadvertently stumbled upon it, my fragile young mind might have broken!
posted by TheCoug at 6:56 AM on November 24

My read on that book is that the loss of his wife broke his mind, and that the book was a view into how he rebuilt it.

I've tried to read I Am A Strange Loop several times, but I kind of lose the thread when the author veers into video feedback, as if its fascinating, trippy nature requires it to mean or signify something more. I'm glad to hear I'm not the only one who saw something going on there. But that's a sad explanation.
posted by Western Infidels at 9:13 AM on November 24

There's something very pure about a young, digital-video-aged person discovering this effect and exploring it. The specifics of the sharpening filter are digital only. But good heavens folks have been making art with analog cameras this way since the 50s, if not before. Don't mean to dismiss it! Just cute to see someone new discover and enjoy it, maybe find something new with the sharpening.
posted by Nelson at 11:05 AM on November 24 [1 favorite]

Anytime my colleagues accidentally share my web cam on Teams, I grab the camera and point it at the monitor. Takes a little careful adjustment before the tunnel kicks in, by which time they usually start sharing the right thing.
posted by inpHilltr8r at 7:49 PM on November 24

You can make some pretty trippy music the same way. You need to have a bit of delay in the feedback, and it helps to feed it with a low frequency tone as the initial input (both keep it from spiraling into high-pitched feedback of the ear-piercing kind). Back in the day I'd plug my Eventide into a mixer and run the output back into the Eventide, to make it sound something like this.
posted by mikeand1 at 12:52 PM on November 25 [3 favorites]

If you're doing this with audio, I recommend including your monitors and a stereo mic in the feedback path! The mic then is a controller for flanging delay on the direct path (one foot per millisecond) as well as the fun part: navigating among all the room reflections.

Distortion and downward pitch shift are a fun combination.
posted by away for regrooving at 11:15 PM on November 28

New video: Seeing sound (and hearing video) with an old CRT TV
posted by Rhaomi at 5:06 PM on December 1