Pure genius! This is the coolest fish augmentation since wheels!

Fish on Wheels:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YbNmL6hSNKw

Jim Crutchfield has a great video that explains the dynamics of video feedback, with really trippy music, and a paper that goes along with it, which he made with his analog video processing computer that he built at the University of California, Santa Cruz for his Ph.D. in physics in 1984.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_P._Crutchfield

https://csc.ucdavis.edu/~chaos/

https://csc.ucdavis.edu/~chaos/chaos/films.htm

Space-Time Dynamics in Video Feedback

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B4Kn3djJMCE

A film by Jim Crutchfield, Entropy Productions, Santa Cruz (1984). Original U-matic video transferred to digital video. 16 minutes.

James P. Crutchfield. Center for Nonlinear Studies, Los Alamos National Laboratories, Los Alamos, NM 87545, USA.

ABSTRACT: Video feedback provides a readily available experimental system to study complex spatial and temporal dynamics. This article outlines the use and modeling of video feedback systems. It includes a discussion of video physics and proposed two models for video feedback based on a discrete-time iterated functional equation and on a reaction-diffusion partial differential equation. Color photographs illustrate results from actual video experiments. Digital computer simulations of the models reproduce the basic spatio-temporal dynamics found in the experiments.

1. In the beginning there was feedback ...

James P. Crutchfield. "Space-Time Dynamics in Video Feedback." Physica 10D 1984: 229-245.

Here's a paper he wrote that describes the effects in that video:

[pdf] https://csc.ucdavis.edu/~cmg/papers/Crutchfield.PhysicaD1984...

[Plates 1-4] https://csc.ucdavis.edu/~cmg/papers/Crutchfield.PhysicaD1984...

[Plates 5-7] https://csc.ucdavis.edu/~cmg/papers/Crutchfield.PhysicaD1984...

"Space-Time Dynamics in Video Feedback. James P. Crutchfield. Center for Nonlinear Studies, Los Alamos National Laboratories, Los Alamos, New Mexico 87545, USA."

"Video feedback provides a readily available experimental system to study complex spatial and temporal dynamics. This article outlines the use and modeling of video feedback systems. It includes a discussion of video physics and proposes two models for video feedback dynamics based on a discrete-time iterated functional equation and on a reaction-diffusion partial differential equation. Color photographs illustrate results from actual video experiments. Digital computer simulations of the models reproduce the basic spatio-temporal dynamics found in the experiments."

Some interesting excerpts:

"In the beginning, I argued that a video feedback system is a space-time simulator. But a simulator of what exactly? This section attempts to answer this question as concretely as possible at this time. A very useful tool in this is the mathematical theory of dynamical systems. It provides a consistent language for describing complex temporal behavior. Video feedback dynamics, though, is interesting not only for the time-dependent behavior but also for its complex spatial patterns. In the following section I will come back to the question of whether current dynamical systems theory is adequate for the rich spatio-temporal behavior found in video feedback. This section introduces the qualitative language of dynamical systems [5], and then develops a set of discrete-time models for video feedback based on the physics of video systems. At the section's end I propose a continuum model akin to the reaction-diffusion equations used to model chemical dynamics and biological morphogenesis."

He also talks about "dislocations", which is similar to the effect of the error diffusion dithering that I love:

"A good example of quasi-attractors is the class of images displaying dislocations. This terminology is borrowed from fluid dynamics, where dislocations refer to the broken structure of convective rolls in an otherwise simple array. Dislocations are regions of broken symmetry where the flow field has a singularity. The formation of this singularity typically requires a small, but significant, energy expenditure*. In video feedback, dislocations appear as inter-digitated light and dark stripes. The overall pattern can be composed of regular parallel arrays of alternating light and dark stripes with no dislocations, and convoluted, maze-like regions where stripes break up into shorter segments with many dislocations. The boundaries between segment ends form the dislocations. They can move regularly or wander erratically. Dislocations form in pairs when a stripe breaks in two. They also annihilate by coalescing two stripes. Dislocations make for very complex, detailed patterns whose temporal evolution is difficult to describe in terms of dynamical systems because of their irregular creation and annihilation. Nonetheless, when perturbed very similar images reappear. A quasi-attractor would be associated with global features, such as the relative areas of regular stripe arrays and dislocation regions, the time-averaged number of dislocations, or the pattern's gross symmetry."

In 2022, Crutchfield and his graduate student Kyle Ray described a way to bring the heat production of conventional circuits below the theoretical limit of Landauer's principle by encoding information not as pulses of charge but in the momentum of moving particles.

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/lsquo-momentum-co...

While a graduate student, Crutchfield and students from the University of California, Santa Cruz (including Doyne Farmer) built a series of computers that were capable of calculating the motion of a moving roulette ball, predicting which numbers could be excluded from the outcome:

The Eudaemonic Pie / Newton's Casino: The Bizarre True Story of How a Band of Physicists and Computer Wizards Took on Las Vegas

https://archive.org/details/eudaemonicpie00bass_0/mode/2up

More about video feedback and vidicon tubes:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16753648

The best link in that posting is broken but here's a good one that shows what I love so much about the blooming effects from those old vidicon tube video cameras:

Donny & Marie Osmond - Disco Finale W/ Welcome Back Kotter Cast, Karen Valentine, Hal Linden...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aFVeIPardK8

Here's some weird video feedback stuff I did on a PowerPC Mac back around 2001 or so:

WarpOMatic Explanation

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ikFF1frSFRg

WarpOMatic Demo 1

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qME6aniaPRg

WarpOMatic Demo 2

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DJoPn1h_ibk