An experiment in self-reference

Lately, I've been reading the book I Am a Strange Loop by Douglas Hofstadter and today I got to a chapter about Hofstadter's experiences playing with video feedback. I was inspired to do a little playing of my own, so I darkened my bedroom, plugged in my webcam, and aimed it at the screen (I used a very handy piece of software called FullScreenTV for the output). I had toyed with pointing a webcam at its own output once before and was verily impressed, but that was in the midst of an online video chat, with no measures to reduce visual noise.

As soon as I pointed the webcam at my screen, a white fireball with blue edges appeared. I have no idea why it was there. I held the webcam in my hand like a baseball, so I could tilt and zoom to stir up the images onscreen. After a bit of playing around with the fireball, I intuitively came to treat it like a physical object I could manipulate, flinging my webcam around like a Wiimote. If I flicked my wrist in one direction, white/blue rectangles (formed by the edges of the screen) cascaded into a curve towards the centre of the screen, getting smaller and smaller as they went; it looked like a staircase coiling around itself. I thought of the fireball as leaving rigid, transparent ice cubes behind it that would melt a few seconds after they were formed. When too many ice cubes got too close to each other, they would light up into white fire, so when too many steps on the staircase got crammed together, the whole thing turned into a burning "tidal wave", shown below.

The fireball itself seemed to stop a few times and turn into a solid, white "ice cube"; I realized that the fireball was just growing and filling up the transparent ice cube it was trapped in.

All these weird patterns and phenomena emerged from nothing more than an image turning back onto itself. Video loops are mesmerizing to play with, and cheap – I used all free software and a webcam that cost me $15 over four years ago. If you've got a webcam, or a friend you can borrow one from, try this experiment. (And if this sort of thing really intrigues you, then you'll probably like Hofstadter too.)