Hydra Experiments

A live video synthesizer running in the browser. Oscillators are kaleidoscoped, masked and modulated against each other into a continuously moving field, with sliders for kaleid, mod and repeat, and three colour states — magenta, cyan, green — that can be switched while it runs. Nothing is rendered in advance; the image is being computed as you watch and never repeats exactly.

Over the field sits a passage of Deleuze on the theatre of repetition — masks before faces, gestures that develop before organised bodies — put through a stir-fry that scrambles and recombines it as you read. Text and image are doing the same thing to each other: repetition that produces difference rather than sameness, which is what the passage is about.

Built with Jim Andrews’ poem stirfry code and Olivia Jacks’ hydra video synthesizer, with thanks to Naito Hieda’s tutorials. Its credits also name the reading behind it: Barad, Trinh Minh-ha, Deleuze.