After having great success with connecting my oscilloscope up to my computer, I figured that the camera should probably be the next thing. Since I’m a big fan of recursive things, I decided to train the camera on it’s own output, and see what the generational loss looked like.
This clip was produced by tethering my camera to a computer, so that each picture that it took was automatically downloaded and shown on the computer display, pointing the camera at the display, and repeatedly triggering the shutter. The outwards motion is caused by the fact that I didn’t have the camera framed quite correctly, the streaking things are from dust on my monitor, and the rest of the patterns are reproduction issues. The setup looked like this:
For an excellent consideration of feedback loops in systems that are way more interesting than just a camera and LCD, I recommend reading Clement Valla’s “Original Copies“, which I originally found via Golan Levin.