Analog Fractals with 1930's Technology
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- Опубліковано 8 чер 2024
- Generating fractal imagery has always been the domain of computers, but it's actually possible to make them with much earlier technology!
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Music (CC BY 4.0):
Polkavant - Poor Boy
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• Video
"It was called television."
I have no idea what that is.
Must be some kind of ancient technology used before our time
My parents used television in the 00s
What is 'television'?
can you eat it?
Zombies usually don't have idea other than what exists next to their hands and eyes .. a mobile is also a TV duh !
@@_skylined Sounds like a made up word. Maybe it has to do with telemarketers?
When you accidentally delete the skybox in the source engine
@@too-many-choices Instead of clearing the sky with white or some other color, it simply stop drawing it all together, leaving whatever was there untouched. If then something else is drawn over it, like for example, the map, it stays in the skybox forever, similar to the recording/viewport effect shown in the video.
Oof
ah yes, the famous smear effect.
as a hammer user i approve this message
@@128wk hall of mirrors
My favorite part is when you paint the fractal blue by just passing a post it in front of the camera
I can't wrap my head around why it stays blue after he takes the post it away ...
@@lonestarr1490 because the fractals being displayed are blue and therefore the factals being repeated are blue :)
@@plazmotech5969 Ah!
But what about the red light from the camera then? (Or why was the fractal red to begin with? I thought it came from the rec light of the webcam.)
@@lonestarr1490 it may be his hand
@@lonestarr1490 It’s a stable shape with the camera position and rotation of the videos on the screen. Some black will creep in from the outside due to the rotation, but there’s certain spots that stay blue because the video rotation perfectly matches. The blue spots are the spots that are blue because the last frame was already blue at the correct position basically
I saw this exact setup on a CRT at a hippie festival in the middle of the desert. It was so cool seeing the mystery broken down in this video!
Burning man?
This guy really loves fractals
Can you blame him?
Then what can you say about Maths Town?
Who doesn't, it's a beautiful form of art
@@animal_gal_adventures9885 It's impressive that math is so good at art
Who doesn't
I've done many experiments myself 20 years ago. Man, the things that came out from This feedback art, are amazing. Almost like liquid plasma animations. It's actually creating frequencies and a sort of a phase modulation with video signals.
This sounds like something I just remembered when I saw the video. I had a VHS portable camera setup years ago, and I remember messing about with feedback by pointing the camera at the screen as it monitored itself, creating these whisp-y effects. Is that the same thing? Wish I still had it!
Same here. 😁
Fractals have always fascinated me, bot because of their appearance in math and nature and because of their simple yet complex imagery.
Douglas Hofstadter has written about this in his book, called I Am A Strange Loop. Really fun to read, if you're into fractals.
his first book too has a section with different effects from a camera looking into a crt tv its pointing to
That fucking book man. Damn near destroyed my life by showing me that a supernatural explanation for consciousness was superfluous.
What a crazy cool book, i thought of that as well
Goddel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid
Oh, I hope he has seen this video by now. Reread with pleasure. And it's fun to read if you're conscious and you know it -clap your hands-
Very similar to J. P. Crutchfield, "Space-Time Dynamics in Video Feedback". Physica 10D (1984) 229-245. (though I believe that used a more involved taxonomy for the various spaces of possible outcomes, however didn't get into multi-projector work). Neat stuff!
ooh i wanna find that. im not quite tech enough to get journal articles... but i bet its an interesting read/skim anyway
@@michaelwerkov3438 You'll definitely like this: ua-cam.com/video/B4Kn3djJMCE/v-deo.html
Was just about to post this haha
@@asdfjkli Fantastic link, thanks so much!
“No one was livestreaming in the 1930’s, right?”
“Actually they were, it’s called television.”
SAVAGE
It sounds less serious than it actually is. Almost all early television was broadcast live, as there was no good way to record (and play back) the stuff.
What were they streaming? Home television wasn't a thing til the 50s.
@@Scarabola World war 2 MLG compilations. They probably just called them news then.
@@Scarabola
Home television began officially in the London area in 1936 (later to the Midlands and North in 1937-38) and in parts of the US in 1941. Unofficially, Baird's system transmitted very very low quality video (30, then 60 and 120 line pictures, mostly in amber rather than B&W) on medium wave AM radio to hobbyists in the early 30s However, launching an expensive plaything in the teeth of the Depression wasn't a smart business move.
The Berlin Olympics events were also transmitted to "Fernsehstuben" (TV viewing booths, more like small temporary cinemas) in 1936. As economic recovery started, other countries started building up new TV systems as a complement to their radio broadcasts.
That's what came into my mind
Sounds like a job for british youtuber extraordinaire techmoan.
Or Technology Connections
Sounds like xnopyt
Or maybe CuriousMarc
Or LOOK MUM NO COMPUTER.
@@Rob_WDefo LMNC!
I'm sure almost everyone has seen a camera pointed at its own output before (particularly if they aren't a zoomer), but it's interesting to realize that all it takes for that phenomenon to become a fractal is for a 2nd copy of the video feed to be displayed to the camera.
It’s interesting alright but i haven’t realized anything about why that’s so
I'm sure it can be set up on tiktok someway
@@raresmircea the project-record system is iterative, and each cycle has all the points of light in the recorded frame move to the inner display frame (which is presumably smaller). When there's a single projection, you just get a tunnel effect as the next copy is just scaled down from the previous. But with two projections, the next copy goes to two places, and if they overlap, you mix points from both. This overlay of one projection with the other creates places where the image is brighter or darker than originally, and since every redraw will use the previous image as its starting point, every redraw you get a different sort of interference pattern. Eventually all points end up in equilibrium, where they remain with the same brightness from one frame to the next, and that's the fractal we observe. Probably not a complete explanation but it's late here so I'll leave it at that.
@@andremeIIo Fantastic, thanks! Also, shifting the camera is important i’d assume (along with superposing the two windows on the screen), otherwise there’s nothing preventing us from just getting two tunnels.
@@322jed I think the ship has already sailed zoomer has reached critical mass. Interesting how basically all the names for the generation are a previous generation's name with the first letter swapped out with a "z"
He will invent time travel soon at this rate.
True
But this is basic
And will explain it so simply too
@@anikinmartinez4726 time travel could be basic too. it could just be that no one has discovered it yet 🤔
We're already traveling through time.
something similar, though not fractal like was howlround, where a camera was pointed at a CRT. it's the effects used in the earliest dr who shows' title sequence.
That’s what I thought of while watching this
That was actually a whole intro chapter in a math book called "Fractals" I read in high school. It literally explained how a CRT TV and a live camera would create a feedback loop capable of creating interesting patterns. There would be an added effect caused by the scan lines of the TV and the camera not lining up, especially if the camera was rotated.
Fractals are awesome
I agree
amojg us
@@fractal5764 lmaooo
(•_) ` ` (_•)
Amo ` Yes.
ngu
sis
coo
l.
well this is a comment by someone
I think the cooles effect was the color change by putting in a bit of differently colored paper.
Filming the screen and then displaying the image on that screen is a bit like a flip flop, thinking about it.
It doesn't stop at fractals, you can create something that looks like cellular automata and turing patterns through a similar process, here's an example produced using 1970's equipment: ua-cam.com/video/WS8v6jKPP68/v-deo.html
your videos are so amazing dude, please never stop
The MoMath museum has this and it's REALLY cool!!
Really cool demonstration of how self-reference naturally leads to chaos and fractals.
Hofstadter talks about this in great detail in 'I am a strange loop'
highly recommended!
the simpler version already appeared in his first book too
he got me feeling like every secret of life and the universe is hidden in this video
I want to send him a link to this vid and the website, he'd probably jizz his pants
@@JrIcify he must have an e-mail address, right? I don't see any harm in sending him a link to the site : p
2:06 best part
That and 2:40 the bit with the blue sticky notes.
“Old man McKenna” would be proud.
great tech to revive the rave scene .
Video feedback can get so weird. Like insane bubbling plastic neon, stuff much deeper than the initial images. My friend and I used to play with it using multiple CRT TVs and an 80s/90s VHS camera plugged into the main TV, then pointing it at another screen with static on it and then back to the looping screen, introducing new signal into the loop. It was mind blowing. I wish I remember exactly what we did but this was over a decade ago. I highly recommend checking out David Blair's UA-cam channel. He built multiple iterations of an amazing mechanical HD video feedback device. It's extremely impressive and the only digital bits are the screens, cameras, and signal routers on the latest version. The rest is analog, no computation, but it's super meta visual feedback, using multiple reflected screens, feeding back into more than one camera, combining results etc. Words don't really explain it well.
The concept of infinity never ceases to amaze me.
This exact technique of overlapping rectangles forming an iterated function system is described well in chapter 2 of Kenneth Falconer's very short introduction to fractals. Beautiful stuff.
When I was a kid, I used to think that this kind of thing would blow something up in a television studio.
I did a lot of similar projects using Flash, back in the early '00s.
One of the coolest effects I was able to produce was a rotating 3D cube that was texture-mapped with a distorted version of the screen itself, which gave similar effects as these fractals.
Messing around with these types of fractals is so much fun because it doesn't take much CPU power and is completely real time.
What I think is really funny is that pointing mics at speakers is painful, but pointing cameras at their own live video feeds is awesome. I guess the only time I can think of where audio feedback isn't terrible (in a live setting) is if you have an electric guitar near its own amp, and you can get some cool feedback effects that way.
Analog version on old equipment will be mindblowing
Yeah, no lag!
Most fascinating part of your setup is using two or more virtual screens. In year 1994, I have been fooling around with positive feedback looping my 100 Hz 16:9 TV (analog, CRT , PAL, 576i - what heavy piece of about 32'' display) with the live view of my Hi8 video camera (with integrated analog recording/playing on/from a magnetic tape boxed in a truly small plastic cassette system - at least in comparison with silly, but most common VHS standard cassettes), interconnected by a S-Video cable (separate video or Y/C are synonyms). As expected, this generated kind of infinity mirror. When I started moving or turning the video camera I created wonderful spinning spirals, most of the white or blue colored - sometimes they started pulsing slowly or flashing fast. Truly fascinated, I spent for sure at least one hour craving for the most overwhelming effect. What a pity, I was not recording this pleasure of old school analog equipment. Feed back looping 4k digital video live stream from my DLSR on a 4k 27'' LCD display did not create the same amazing effects lately. Now, I very thank You for Your video clip here - it opens me the door of new perceptions of a much greater space of fantastic worlds to visit. quantenkristall aka FarbigeWelt alias Michael Trösch (born end of May 1973).
Amazing!!! Best content on youtube I saw in years! Congratulations! This one deserves go viral!
“There’s something so fun and charming about physically manipulating fractals with your hand” this quote reminds me of an idea that I had which is quite like this, but with sound waves. A program that displays one cycle of a wave that gets repeated over a certain frequency, and you’re able to drag and manipulate the wave however you like
This guy always put here making novel fractal content just warms my heart - great video!!
man why is your channel such a goldmine
Theres a few pages dedicated to this in Godel Escher Bach by douglas hofstadter. He even explores how you can get oscialations without even moving the camera
Was gonna say this. The book was written in the 70s, and done using analog tv camera.
@@Miyelsh yes! that was one of my favorite chapters, i enjoyed all of the diagrams and how he characterized the different kinds of emergent behaviors (along with the tie in to the whole theme of self reference)
Get this to technology connections!!! Its right up his alley for doing it on original equipment
Only found this channel a day or 2 ago. Easilly one of the best out there for content. Amazing stuff.
This fractal-ly video feedback loop is a main point in Douglas Hofstadter's marvelous book I am a strange loop (2006)
When people had those old video cameras there was an urban legend that if you did this it could break the camera somehow. Nobody could explain why but they instinctually felt like there was something so powerful happening that the camera or TV would be overloaded and break.
well, uh, time to set up the projector lol :)
Can't help thinking of the Bohemian Rhapsody video while watching this. That's super cool how it makes delayed spiraly echoes though, and I loved how you changed the color with the blue post it note ^.^
Awesome update to the old process. Iterative analog. It's called video feedback. We used to do it all the time. Nice multiple cam version
The book "Gödel, Escher, Bach: an Eternal Golden Braid" has pictures of this sort of thing with analog TV.
This is amazing, I appreciate your work driven by passion a lot!
I love your vids!
What an amazing concept! Thanks for putting this together. I enjoyed the play and learned from it.
Dude this is amazing, what a champion. Instant music video, so using this thank you
You are just an amazing person, CodeParade. Not only does this look cool, but it's simple and you even made a website for it.
This was incredible; thank you so much for sharing!
I'm genuinely surprised this *wasn't* done often, its absolutely mesmerising!
This is incredible! So fundamentally interactive with the use of your hands and everyday objects. The possibilities seem endless... .
What you created is called a L-system, or Lindenmayer system. The disposition of the projectors is the grammar, that clones and scales/moves the input. You can arrange your setup to replicate the Sierpinski Triangle, the Koch Curve, etc.
I don't mean to be that guy but this is totally 100% wrong. This is more like an iterated function system (IFS) fractal. The most famous of which is the Barnsley fern which you can even see him replicate in the video at 3:13 which cannot be produced using l-systems.
IFS fractals essentially define the big picture (what the camera sees) in terms of transformations of the big picture otherwise known as smaller pictures. (The moveable preview windows displayed on screen.) This is actually an incredibly genius way of demonstrating the principle behind IFS fractals.
L-system fractals involve strings of characters that make up code for the computer to draw the fractal line by line. It's more complex than that but feel free to look it up.
Sources:
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iterated_function_system
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barnsley_fern
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/L-system
You can even see the Barnsley fern represented by the several "screens" that make it up here: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iterated_function_system#/media/File:Fractal_fern_explained.png
Also I'm a CS major and took a class about fractals specifically and learned all this stuff there.
@@pwilll If you think a grammar can only draw lines or work on strings, I'm afraid your CS degree is worth less than the fancy paper it's printed on.
@@dkosmari I said nothing about grammars or how much they can do. I also never claimed to actually have a degree although I am only 2 months away from graduating. I am specifically talking about using L-systems to generate IFS fractals. Please create or find for me an L-system grammar that produces the Barnsley fern. I'll wait.
@@pwilll Dude, you can literally encode camera transforms into strings. Instead of "draw line" you do "render the framebuffer from the last iteration." The rest is identical. Stop acting like a smart ass just because you spent 10 min on Wikipedia. Yes, by declaring what L-sysyems can't do, you made 100% false statements about grammars. You're just uneducated enough about what you're saying that you don't know it. I wrote a L-system that would render the framebuffer back in a loop exactly like that before I got my CS degree. Each render step is a new application of the grammar.
@@dkosmari I think you're really kind of overgeneralizing here. By saying "instead of draw line" do "render the framebuffer"" you're already describing something that wouldn't be recognized as an L-system. You're not wrong to say that L-systems and IFS have similarities and that's because they're both methods for creating fractals and thus work on similar principles. I literally took an entire class about these specific facts and the Wikipedia pages back me up. Do you want me to ask my professor? I don't like getting into dick-measuring contests about credibility but for this class I also implemented several L-system fractals as well as IFS fractals and several other kinds. This is very clearly an implementation of IFS fractals and if you'd actually read the wikipedia page I think you'd agree.
I also took a course that elaborated on grammars and they certainly have their limitations depending on which kind you are talking about.
My brother and I did something similar with a camera upside down (with some tilt) pointed at the TV. Turn the colour and contrast up and adjust the brightness for a black screen. Then put stuff inbetween camera and tv.
This is the next level! Multiple viewports! My brother would have been impressed!
So cool to see new images forming each time from a limit.
Truly beautiful and mesmerizing...
I did this in 1978 in high school w. our home tv and a borrowed jvc reel (pre vhs) camera+recorder. I managed to "tip balance" the b/w feedback pattern with the zoom and make a circle of points and other weird patterns. I also recorded it on the recorder. Music score was Sonic seasonings by Wendy Carlos. Noone was interested.
"Space-Time Dynamics in Video Feedback" by Jim Crutchfield is probably the best example of this I've seen. Analogue fractals made in the 1980's
It's on yt here: ua-cam.com/video/B4Kn3djJMCE/v-deo.html Seriously some of the stuff in that film is almost magic.
It really makes clear shows you how fractals emerge from feedback loops, that's neat
3:00 That one wins. I love how colorful it is and how it fades out into smaller spirals.
amazing bro thanks for sharing! Love that effects
You just made me SO F*KING HAPPY
This guy wins the internet.
This would have been so cool for Psychedelic Rock Concerts; It reminds me of the liquid projections bands would use
0:36 My first thought was when I used to connect a video camera up to a TV as a kid and teen to create very cool recursive images on the TV, so imagine my surprise when seconds later at 0:41 happens.
this is so cool! thank you for letting us try it on the website :)
Awesome video CodeParade.
I wouldn't be surprised if someone like Len Lye tried something like this. That man was 40 years ahead of his time.
When repeated loops were filmed, old cathode TVs turned blue. On old TV shows, they used to have that happen. An infinite blue screen instead of ant wars.
I remember having a kaleidoscope as a kid. It was so pretty. And fractal looking.
Great video as always
Video feedback is so fun to play with. Back in the day, I was part of a student tv studio at school where they used old tube based cameras. We were quickly warned against creating video feedback. The concern was that if not carefully controlled that it would quickly overrun the camera's tubes maybe damaging the signal circuits and cause burn-in on the monitors. Of course, we would still do it until we were caught. Sadly, with a single camera-monitor setup, the best we created was a very basic fractal pattern; nothing as great as what you're showing.
So cool! First saw this in a demo for a 3trinsRGB+1c analog video synth demo, where they feed the output of a camera facing the output screen for the video synth back into the video synth and process it to make them even cooler.
theres a whole scene about analog video art, fractals, feedback, and glitching!
Cool! I did this kind of "fractals" using video feedback in the 1980's using cathode-ray-tube television and vidicon-tube color video camera. It actually works with only one monitor/projector too, because if they are rotated in a certain way, or perhaps the camera should be turned upside-down - I don't remember exactly, the scanning delays of the tubes create feedback-loops in the signals and fractals emerge. Though, it might not work with digital displays and cameras in the same way, and certainly the fractals will not be as multifaceted.
It's not all analog. The computations are happening in the digital camera sensor, in any software running, and the digital display. Analog video cameras are getting scarce. But, it doesn't matter if anything is analog or digital. Both are cool. Digital can do things analog can't, and vice versa.
Very clever and beautiful! I need to play with this, thanks for making and sharing the site. It's really going to lengths for the community. :) But i agree, this needs to be done in analogue.
There's a scene in the music video for Queen - Bohemian Rhapsody which was filmed using this technique.
I wonder why it always seems to turn red...
Red seems to be preferred due to the white-balance settings making it more sensitive. But I tried to balance it as best I could.
@@CodeParade I personally really like how the colour changes as it descends down each branch. Beautiful stuff as always!
@@CodeParade Did you adjust the camera settings only, or the display also?
Wow, that doped soundtrack really complements the video. Pity that there's no such account at the Soundcloud anymore.
I did something similar with our VHS camera and a TV set back when I was like 12yo but never thought that using two cameras and somehow mixing two projections will make so much difference.
awesome video as always
Yoooo that bit at 3:13 with the leaf and turning it red??? That's so sick!!!! It's like fire!!!
Instant sub. Keep the content up!
So cool thanks for sharing!
very clever! reminds me of the fractals in PowerPoint stuff people have been doing for a while, but the analog aspect makes it new all over again.
A friend and I used multiple capture windows on OBS along with hue/sharpening effects to make some very trippy fractal imagery!
Really great thing! Made my day.
I cannot like this video hard enough. So many shapes and colors. Radical.
That was an incredible idea! Never thought like that before.
Wow, this looked very cool!
This is, by far, the coolest thing I have seen on the internet!
When you described the process I didn't think the fractals would look nearly as cool.
Frax is a pretty cool fractal app, great video
The National Museum of Mathematics in New York City has an exhibit where you can play with this effect in real time, using multiple movable cameras aimed at a single large screen. (It's using modern video equipment, though.)
I had a few TVs and a few security cameras as a kid. Used to do this all the time. And yes is works really nice with a pair of projectors pointed at the same screen at different angles. nice video!
That looks fantastic!
as a boomer I can tel you they did do it. In the 70's at school we had a closed circuit TV station and often pointed the cameras at the TV screens to create trippy FX too, many of the 60's and 70's music clips featured these effects.
Nice. Perfect visual demonstration of iterated function systems. To the point it shows much of the properties of IFS. Like the fractal shape being the same for arbitrary start points and only depending on the transforms. Except for how it's coloured in. All perfectly demonstrated by a physical embodiment of the math involved :D
1:26 "Though to my knowledge, this never actually happened until the computer age"
I guess 1975 was technically "the computer age" but the music video for Bohemian Rhapsody definitely uses this technique.
My mom is big into feedback fractals. She often uses two crts and a pane of glass at an angle, filming one through it and the reflection of the other. The fuzziness of analog video adds a lot of character, too