Video Feedback Kinetic Sculpture: The God Machine

I'm recreating the Device in 4K! (And, driving to the LEAF electronics arts festival in Lafayette, Colorado (here)).

Going from Standard Definition video to High Definition last year created amazing images that I never would have imagined possible. Going from HD to 4K will be another huge leap in detail, complexity and emergent behavior - who knows what unusual light-creatures will materialize? Let's find out.

This will not be inexpensive to do, and I need your help (4K monitors with the necessary hue / contrast / brightness / saturation knobs are very expensive).

Any amount will help - $5, $10, $10,000 - whatever you can afford!

Thank you for your support -

Dave

See the Device on boingboing, again on boingboing , on kottke , on hackaday, on slaschcam, on reddit, and read a review  by Rich Walkling.

Go to thelightherder for more videos and explanations. See the latest video shoot with the Device. Check out Phase III here to see the new t-slot aluminum construction, and the latest video created with this new build.

The HD Video Feedback Kinetic Sculpture creates fractals and organic-looking images in real-time, without a computer: this is old-school video feedback.

This is part sculpture, part performance art, and may make the most complex video feedback ever created, using three cameras, two video switchers, a sheet of beam-splitter glass, and an HDMI input from a phone or live video feed.

Much like a musical instrument, the operator at the helm of this device plays it, but instead of making sounds, makes entire worlds, spirals within spirals, loops within loops, galaxies, classical fractal imagery and primordial organisms, leaves, trees, and insects.  It really is the God machine.

I started this project a year ago, and did the first video shoot a month or so after (https://youtu.be/wMeV98BHLVE). The device has evolved naturally since then, as have the images it can create. On this page is the most recent video, shot almost exactly one year to the day from the beginning.

"It really is quite tangled...very impressive. Lots of wonderful fern-like stuff, also some jellyfish-like stuff, and the Sierpiński gasket now and then. Congratulations!" 
       
             - Douglas Hofstadter 

"I like what you are doing very much. It's fascinating. Reminds me of the days when I was playing - experimenting - discovering." 

             - Heinz-Otto Peitgen