Hi list, On my way towards breakdown (late July), I connected a faulty old (reclaimed from abandoned streetware many years ago) TV, a mostly-broken VCR, and a broken HDD TV recorder (each of which had two SCART I/O ports) in a loop using 3 cables. I turned it on and went outside before pointing the TV out the window with my remote controls and tried to make it work. There was either extremely loud white noise or (on changing channels) a black screen and a slight echo from noise to silence in the audio. Maybe some high pass filters / dc blockers / amplification could fix it to make something more interesting and evolving. South East London electronics wizards please get in touch and maybe a proper version 2 can be collaboratively constructed.
Sadly I didn't document it, but there were at least 3 witnesses to the project / performance / installation / happening / thing. Was also thinking of finding an oldschool GenLock for my Amiga A500+, to overlay graphics into the feedback loop and maybe make it more manipulable. Then I unfurled 500m of twine from my window down past the train station towards the park (unfortunately it didn't quite reach, it must be 600m to the park from my flat..) as a breadcrumb trail to guide potential visitors (I had one bicyclist ask what was going on but he seemed to be scared off by the noise pretty quick). When I returned from meditation in the park the twine had been rearranged, more taut in some places, looser in others, with little loops and spirals back and forth in others. Mysterious artistic collaborators, origin unknown! Soon a man from the housing association turned up and asked me to remove the twine as it was a "trip hazard" and they didn't want anyone to get hurt, so I obeyed. Almost got the twine caught in a lorry turning a corner, which was scary, but I survived. It got pretty warm too, I think it was wise that I didn't leave on longer - the (unlit) candles on top of the TV had melted slightly... Two months in psychward eventually followed, I'm back to full health (better than ever, perhaps), and no harm done (apart from perhaps disturbing my neighbours too early of a morning with noise and art in public...). Digital versions of feedback processes aren't quite the same, they lack the essence of noise and chaos and happenstance, too finite... - there's an mp3 out there supposedly retranscoded 666 times, artifacty heavy metal music, if nothing else serves as a warning against lossy conversion. I had a copy somewhere, not sure where it is now... On 23/09/12 17:48, Mark Hancock wrote: > I loved doing this sort of thing when I got my first video camera. I did a > similar thing with a photocopier that was malfunctioning and an a4 picture of > Kathy Acker from Blitz magazine (circa 1985?) : Scanned in a copy that came > out poor quality and sepia, then put that through again, ripped the copy of > the copy, then layered that over the first and scanned, ripped, scanned, ad > infinitum. > > I was probably thinking something about cut-ups and her writing at the time. > They made nice pics though that I was quite pleased with. > > So naturally I completely forgot to save them and threw them out a few months > later. idiot. > > I love it when technology breaks down and people start playing with it. It's > like the organic breaking through the sleek, hard lines of manufactured > 'perfection.' The dystopian reality of nature always finds a way to carry on > mutating the world to ensure survival, even against the elements that seem > most capable of resisting that mutation (corporate electronics/apple etc). > > M > > > > On 22 Sep 2012, at 17:39, marc wrote: > >> Camera and TV Loop >> >> As described in Douglas Hofstadter's book 'Godel, Escher, Bach', this is >> what happens when you connect your camera to your TV and point the >> camera at the screen. The spirals are created by tilting the camera. >> >> http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y-gqMTt3IUg# Claude -- http://mathr.co.uk _______________________________________________ NetBehaviour mailing list [email protected] http://www.netbehaviour.org/mailman/listinfo/netbehaviour
