Video Feedback, Emergence, and Poetry

I submitted the following short video as part of a midterm for a course on Chaos and Fractals in my junior year of undergrad. In it, I play with video feedback generated by pointing my laptop webcam to a television in College of the Atlantic's Thorndike Library Seminar Room while trying to express my admiration for emergence in complex systems, and making a connection to poetry.

I controlled the video stream using OpenCV in Python, which allowed me to manipulate various properties of the image, like hue, saturation, whether of not to invert the image, tile, translate, rotate, or mirror it, etc. In the recordings of video feedback streams that you will see in this video, I vary the following image properties:

• monochrome/colour
• no inverting/inverting
• no mirroring/mirroring
• hue shifts

The result is this pretty cute and fun video which I hope you will enjoy: