Talysis (9 min DVD) was made for the Crystalpunk Workshop for Soft Architecture held in Utrecht, Holland in Autumn 2005. The film explored elements self-organisation and crystallisation - autocatalytic replication and recursive symmetry using digital video feedback.

Its navigates the possibility of a sentient geometry to produce a stream of geometric archetypes, a collective unconscious for emergent dynamical systems, a video feedback language system for pattern recognition.

Many of the forms generated in Talysis appear to model biological morphogenesis and suggests that at the heart of all biological growth lies some degree of feedback of information to the system. At first glance many of the stills from Talysis might have been taken from an atlas of biology. There are neural networks, synapses, biological tissues, capillaries, plant structures, and embryonic forms. All of these images were arrived at from pointing a DV camera at its own output, they are entirely self-generative.

‘One goal in studying video feedback is to see whether it could be used as a simulator for dynamics in other fields. Turing’s original proposal of reaction-diffusion equations for biological morphogenesis comes to mind, as well as the image processing and hallucinogenic dynamics of the visual cortex’

Space-Time Dynamics in Video Feedback, James P Crutchfield, Physica 1984

Video Feedback systems tend toward either stability or chaos. While the stable attractor offers some interest in the subtleties of its decay, the unstable attractor offers an unlimited supply of endless evolving motifs and a window on emergent behaviour. The key whilst making Talysis was to tease the system into chaotic emergence via camera movement (rotation and positioning). The important thing was to catch the movement of ‘catching a shape’ in a particular temporal phase to feed back into the system advancing the complexity and initiating lifelike (sentient) behaviour

At certain points in the transformation of imagery, Talysis begins to behave as a computer program by organising and animating units in an identical way to a Cellular Automata. One sequence of Talysis behaves exactly like the Game of Life, a 2d Cellular Automata, and implies that Video Feedback has the ability to simulate the calculations of recursive algorithms and actually behave as a computer. Like CA’s, the complexity is arrived at from a simple rule set - Video Feedback is produced by pointing the camera at its own output. With this ‘morphogenetic algorithm’ in mind consider the CA patterns that adorn the Oliva Porphyria shell for example.

Talysis streams a sequence of familiar forms with each viewer bringing to it their own personal archetypes and internal references. The use of symmetry particularly accentuates the Rorschach effect, the ability to see things in apparently abstract forms through pattern recognition. To this end autocatalytic systems like Talysis can be used as an aid to scrying and algorithmic pattern recognition. Parts of Talysis have a strobe effect to accentuate this property. The rate of flicker occurs around the 10-12hz or cycles/second, the rate ascribed to alpha state, where the brain is more receptive to an unconscious data flow.

The history of cultural art forms utilising self-generative motifs, Islamic Calligraphy, Tibetan Tankas, Mandalas and Hindu Yantras for example, is a way, it seems, of encoding certain kinds of conscious states. The self-similar motifs are an apparent language system to encode states of trance – a visual mantra to be later decoded and experienced by its audience.

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