The Light Herder has built a 4K video feedback machine that generates fractals with no rendering software. A camera points at a screen showing its own feed. The resulting recursive loop produces fractal geometry in real time, analog, at 3840x2160 resolution.
The engineering problem was brutal: HD and 4K displays dropped the per-pixel hue, saturation, brightness, and contrast controls that old SD televisions had, and those controls are not optional for this technique. The solution is a Teensy microcontroller receiving input from a physical analog control board and translating it to RS-232 commands sent directly to the LCD driver boards. The word 'analog' in the title is doing heavy lifting. The build video makes clear this took serious work in driver board selection alone. This is the third generation of the sculpture, up from a 720p original and a previous HD iteration called God Machine II.
Read the full piece and watch both embedded videos to understand why the control architecture matters as much as the optics. The demo video is the payoff. The build video is the argument.
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