Penetrabit: Slime-Temples

by Rob Hardin

Life is a disease of matter.
--Goethe

I
30 cm. of creeping protoplasm,
absently gibbering spirals, hexahedrons, hillocks, trills
may indicate an autocatalytic reaction.
And the hypnotic figurations of nerve axons-

Receptive, active, quiescent-
turn like scrolls of electrolyzed plasma.
Both substances reveal a talent for spatial organization:
their dead thrashings trace patterns of cerebral complexity.

Similarly, the contractions of human heart muscle
resemble a wave spreading outward.
When the wave is broken, heart fibrillations
exhibit persistent patterns. And, often

these autocatalytic spirals of disease
are attended by failure and death.

II
The surface of the brain
may also erupt in a necropolis of spirals.
Reverberating cortical depression
brings with it a pattern of self-propagating forms.

Even a disc galaxy follows this rococo pathology:
its tentacles of stars are ragged whorls.
A parahuman architect is endless sketching cochlear temples to its own vacant energies.

If god is dead, he is dressed as a tendrillar Louis XIV,
and his fingers are twitching.

More screenshots

Here's the latest.

Edit: I've added some more screenshots to the gallery, with tasty vertical symmetry imposed by mirroring.


Here I'm trying out some different maps, and also incorporating a camera feed, which is what gives it the more fuzzy, organic look. The geometric patterns with n-way radial symmetry come from z' = z*c, which gives simple scaling and rotation. The squished circles come from z' = sin(real(p) + t) + i*sin(imag(p)), where p = z^2 + c and t is a real parameter.

More fractal video feedback

I've been working on a new implementation of the fractal video feedback idea. Unlike the previous attempts, the code is nice and modular, so complicated bits of OpenGL hackery get encapsulated in an object with a simple interface. It's still very much a work in progress, but I thought I'd share some results now. Feedback (no pun intended) is very much appreciated.

Video:

Shoving the video through the YouTubes kills the quality. I have some higher quality screenshots in a Flickr gallery. Some of my favorites:

The basic idea is the same as Perceptron: take the previous frame, map it through some complex function, draw stuff on top, repeat. In this case, the "stuff on top" consists of a colored border around the buffer that changes hue, plus some moving polygons that can be inserted by the user (which aren't used in the video, but are in some of the stills). In these examples, the map is a convex combination of complex functions; in the video it's z' = a*log(z)*c + (1-a)*(z²+c). Here z is the point being rendered, z' is the point in the previous frame where we get its color, c is a complex parameter, and a is a real parameter between 0 and 1.

There are two modes: interactive and animated. In interactive mode, c and a are controlled with a joystick (which makes it feel like a flight simulator on acid). The user can also place control points in this (c,a) space. In animated mode, the parameters move smoothly between these control points along a Catmull-Rom spline, which produces a nice C1 continuous curve.

The feedback loop is rendered offscreen at 4096x4096 pixels. Since colors are inverted every time through the loop, only every other frame is drawn to the screen, to make it somewhat less seizuretastic. At this resolution, the system has 48MB of state. On my GeForce 8800GTS I can get about 100 FPS in this loop; by a conservative estimate of the operations involved, this is about 60 GFLOPS. I bow before NVIDIA. Now if only I had one of these...

More on VR for consciousness hacking

I was talking to Biff today about uses for various senses in the VR consciousness hacking idea. It occurred that smell is very low-bandwidth, but strongly tied to memory, and thus might be useful for maintaining state across multiple sessions.

Also, apparently Terence McKenna was also interested in using VR for similar purposes. I'm not sure if that makes the idea more or less credible.

In other news, the laser glove is about 80% done; all I need to do is wire it up. I need to talk to some sort of EE person about how to do this without exploding the lasers from overcurrent.

RepRap : a self-replicating rapid prototyper

RepRap is a project to make a rapid prototyping machine (aka 3D printer) which can build most of its own parts, with a total cost of under $500. There are already several working prototypes, and they "hope to announce self-replication in 2008".

"RepRap etiquette asks that you use your machine to make the parts for at least two more... for other people at cost."

If this achieves the exponential growth that they're obviously aiming for, it will enable open source distributed development of physical objects (including of course itself), which would be nothing short of revolutionary.

And their canonical test object is a shotglass.

idea : VR for consciousness hacking

Ooh, interpolating tessellations is an awesome idea. You'd basically have to interpolate under a constraint, that some parts of the spline line up with other parts. But since this constraint is satisfied at all reference points, I think it would be doable.

I've been thinking lately about virtual reality as a tool for consciousness hacking. VR as played out in the mid-90's was mostly about representing realistic scenes poorly and at great expense. But I think we can do a lot with abstract (possibly fractal-based) virtual spaces, and the hardware is much better and cheaper now. The kit I'm imagining consists of:

• 3D stereoscopic head-mounted display with 6DOF motion tracker (like this)
  
• High-quality circumaural headphones (like these)
• Homemade EEG (like this)
  
• Possibly other biofeedback devices (ECG, skin resistance, etc.)
• Intuitive controllers (e.g. data glove like this, camera + glowing disks for whole-body motion-tracking, etc.)
• A nice beefy laptop with a good graphics card
• Appropriate choice of alphabet soup and related delivery mechanism, if desired
• A locking aluminum equipment case with neat foam cutouts for all of the above

With the right software this can obviously do a great many things. For example, I've found that after experimenting with a graphics effect for a while, I develop the ability to hallucinate the same effect. With more control over the training period it might be possible to train more complicated effects, determine how much computation versus playback of prerecorded samples is going on at "runtime", and determine on what level(s) of abstraction the hallucinated data manifests. Of course, for actual scientific results we'd need to duplicate the experiments over many people, but personally I'm more interested in hacks that give me greater access to and understanding of my own mind.

Idea : crowd feedback

This is another idea relating to video feedback systems. Imagine an exhibition of a system like Perceptron on several monitors throughout a gallery space. A set of cameras watches the crowd from above, and uses simple frame differencing and motion detection algorithms to determine a map of activity level across the space. This then feeds into the video system; perhaps each region of the space is associated with some IFS function, seed point, or color, and the activity level in that region determines how prominently that feature affects the images.

Each monitor can display a different view of the same overall parameter space, so at any given time there will be some "interesting" and some "boring" monitors. Viewers are naturally drawn towards more "interesting" (by their own aesthetic senses) monitors, and in moving to get a better look they affect the whole system. In essence, the aesthetic preferences of the viewers (now participants) become another layer of feedback.

If Hofstadter is right, and "strange loops" give rise to conscious souls, then should the participants in such an exhibition be considered as having (slightly) interconnected souls? If so, how does the effect compare in magnitude to the interconnectedness we all share through the massive feedback loop of the everyday world? Does this effect extend to the artist who makes the system and then sits back and watches passively? What about the computer that's making it all happen? Is any of this actually "strange" enough to be considered a strange loop? All of these questions seem fantastically hard to answer, but it's a lot of fun to think about.

I'm on the Interblag!

I finally got around to writing something for this blog. First, I have a quotation from our beloved Admiral:

"Do you want this fire extinguisher? No? How about this tag that says 'do not remove under penalty of fire marshal'?"

Second, the Perceptron screenshots on here look really damn good, and I decided I should post some of what I've been working on lately as well. This started yesterday as a CS 101 assignment and kind of got out of control.






There's also a movie here of me playing with it. It's 56M and still looks shitty due to compression, but you can at least get the idea. May cause seizures in a small percentage of the population.

Update: The video is (maybe) on YouTube now: