I Am a Strange Loop

Even today, all these years later, the origins of such pulsation remain quite unclear, even mysterious, to me; for that reason, it is an emergent phenomenon, otherwise known as an epiphenomenon, as discussed in Chapter 3. In general, an emergent phenomenon somehow emerges quite naturally and automatically from rigid rules operating at a lower, more basic level, but exactly how that emergence happens is not at all clear to the observer.

I admit to feeling a little dense for not having fully fathomed what lies behind video reverberation, but at this point I am so accustomed to it that it “makes sense” to me. That is, I have a clear intuition for how to induce it on the screen, and I know that once it starts, it is a robust phenomenon that will continue unabated probably for hours, perhaps even forever, if I don’t interfere with it. Rather than trying to figure out how to account precisely for video reverberation in terms of phenomena at lower levels, I have come to just accept it as a fact, and I deal with it at as a phenomenon that exists at its own level. This should sound familiar to you, since it’s how we deal with almost everything in our physical and biological world.

Feeding “Content” to the Loop

As I mentioned at the outset, one lucky thing about the Stanford setup was the seemingly random metallic strip on one side of the television set I’d been given to use. That strip — a kind of interloper — added a key note of “spice” to the image that was being cycled round and round, and in that sense it was a crucial ingredient of Video Voyage I.

While Bill and I were conducting Video Voyage II, there were times, to our surprise, when the seas we were sailing seemed a bit too placid for our taste, and we longed for a bit more action, more visual excitement. This brought to my mind the crucial “spicy” role played by the interloping metal strip during Voyage I, so on a lark we decided to introduce something that would play an analogous role in our system. I picked up various objects around the room and dangled them in front of the camera without any idea of what would happen when the image was cycled round and round the video loop. Usually we got marvelous results that were (once again) unanticipatable. For instance, when I dangled a chain of beads in front of the screen, what emerged (the choice of verb is not accidental) was a random-looking swirl of pockmarked bluish-white globs that reminded me a bit of some kind of exotic cheese.

Of course each such interloping object opened up a whole new universe of possibilities, since we could vary its position as well as all the other standard variables (the amount of zoom, the angle of tilt, the direction of the camera, the brightness, the contrast, and others). I tried such things as a glass vase, a compact disk, and, eventually, my own hands. The results were quite fantastic, as you can see in the color insert, but alas, Bill and I didn’t have infinite amounts of time to explore the manifold universes we had uncovered and sampled. We played with the possibilities for perhaps a dozen hours and from that we got a 400-photo memory album, and that’s all. Like any excursion to a wondrous and exotic place, our trip had to end earlier than we would have preferred, but we were very glad to have taken it and to have savored it together.

A Mathematical Analogue

As might be expected, all the unexpected phenomena that I observed depended on the nesting of screens being (theoretically) infinite — that is, on the apparent corridor being endless, not truncated. This was the case because the most unpredictable of the visual phenomena always seemed to happen right in the vicinity of that central point where the infinite regress converges down to a magical dot.

My explorations did not teach me that any shape whatsoever can arise as a result of video feedback, but they did show me that I had entered a far richer universe of possibilities than I had expected. Today, this visual richness reminds me of the amazing visual universe discovered around 1980 by mathematician Benoit Mandelbrot when he studied the properties of the simple iteration defined by z → z² + c, where c is a fixed complex number and z is a variable complex number whose initial value is 0. This is a mathematical feedback loop where one value of z goes in and a new value comes out, ready to be fed back in again, just as in audio or video feedback. The key question is this: If you, playing the role of microphone and loudspeaker (or camera and TV), do this over and over again, will the z values you get grow unboundedly, sailing off into the wild blue (or wild yellow or wild red) yonder, or will they instead home in on a finite value?