Dave Blair and the God Machine
May 27, 2025Prelude: The Fractal As a New Shape for Thought
The shapes through which we think and write have direct bearing upon the products which we create through them, however unknowingly. In fifth grade, we are taught to write the thesis first, then find our way to it through the essay. The shape is a line or a one-way arrow. Later, in university, perhaps, we are told that the thesis is more a helpful fiction before the essay is written, and an emergent, retroactive crystallization after the fact; this thinking shades in a circle from the inside, the thesis being the eventually realized circumference.
As we read and think more, we encounter endless shapes through which we can think: Plato’s Republic resembles a squiggling, measured, meander; Hegel formed meaning through tensegrity, where each component in the system is reliant on every other, the whole affair held in constant co-tension; Heiddeiger often wrote in spirals, circling round and round until something emerged at the center; Deleuze and Guattari championed the rhizome—a multiplicitous, non-linear, spontaneously-intersecting assemblage that starts and ends at no specific point and is rather always in the middle.
The very best writers and thinkers draw their own shape through which they find meaning, explicitly or otherwise. Each must answer for themselves both: “what to say?” and “how to say it?” It is therefore imperative that we continually draw new shapes for thought, that we explore new maps to meaning, since what we can say is ultimately subordinate to how we get to, and go about saying it.
Consider, then, the fractal. A fractal is a special sort of geometry that has an infinite amount of detail and exists at all scales. The pattern of its structure exists no matter how far out or far in one zooms into the shape. Any image of a fractal is, therefore, always incomplete; it will only represent one “resolving cut” along its scalar continuum. The celebrated example in mathematics is the coastline: we can estimate the length of any coastline by measuring its various twists and turns by some arbitrary unit of measurement, say, through one-kilometer increments. But if we were to zoom in and count the twists and turns at the level of each centimeter, suddenly the measurement is far greater. And if we keep going and look at every grain of sand, every atom, the measurement approaches infinity. A fractal is thus less a traditional geometric shape, and more the embodied interaction between scales and the resulting patterns these interactions take.
Could we make meaning through the peculiar shape of a fractal? Might we go beyond “investigating the topic from all angles” by investigating the topic from all scales? Humanity’s scalar range is surely much more vast than it used to be, perhaps we ought to reflect this in today’s thinking. Through a fractal epistemology, the phenomenological, personal, contextual, political, global, historical, and metaphysical become various scales through which the fractal manifests. At any specific level, at any one resolving cut along the scalar spectrum, the various surrounding scales become its defining border texture.
So many theories of art make claims to the “right” scale through which to make meaning. They range from “nothing but the work itself” all the way up through historical materialism, where the work dissolves into a movement or an era, the emergent product of a time. What if we attempt both? Or, more precisely, the resulting fractal interaction between them? The information at any one scale (say, historical) is only made possible through the occlusion of other detail (say, the phenomenological, as it relates to the historical). Any given scale is always the result of a negotiation between detail and breadth—so why not try them all? The work of art surely spans all.
***
A man has made “The God Machine,” and no one seems to have noticed. It is made out of maple and mahogany wood, aluminum, an array of cameras, screens, and wiring, and requires its creator for its proper operation. Together, the man and his machine create dynamic, living fractal geometries through continuously looping video feedback. It is a peculiar sort of God, yes, but one I have come to believe deserves praise. The man’s name is Dave Blair, and the story of his machine, its implications, and my encounter with it reverberate throughout the scalar spectrum.
The basic mechanism of The God Machine, also known by Blair as “The Light Herder,” is to create controlled video feedback, a process whereby a camera views its own output, thereby sending an image into a loop of camera-screen-camera-screen, etc. Perhaps you have experienced a rudimentary version of video feedback when screen sharing on Zoom, and the window containing the screenshare, now displaying itself, infinitely regresses backward to a point. Or you may have experienced the much more common auditory analog wherein a microphone’s input is coming from its own output, like when the singer at a live concert steps past the front edge of the speakers, and wild, echoing, screeching ensues.
James Crutchfield, director of the Complexity Sciences Center at the University of California, Davis, explains the mechanism in his paper Space-Time Dynamics in Video Feedback: “In the beginning, there was feedback. Video technology moves visual information from here to there, from camera to TV monitor. What happens, though, if a video camera looks at its monitor? The information no longer goes from here to there, but rather round and round the camera-monitor loop. That is video feedback. From this dynamical flow of information, some truly startling and beautiful images emerge. In a very real sense, a video feedback system is a space-time simulator.” In a perfect system with no degradation of the image by the camera, if the camera were to “look” at its own output on a screen facing the lens as described above, nothing visually interesting would happen, though a change would have certainly occurred. Once the screen was switched from displaying a pre-loaded image to displaying the output of the camera, which was, just a second ago, viewing that image, the image would remain, as if nothing happened. The difference would be ontological, not visual; the image would exist no longer as a static quantum of data, but as a continuously looping entity within the ouroboric circuit of camera-display-camera.
This already has interesting metaphorical and philosophical possibilities. Blair compares this basic phenomenon of video feedback to the emergent structure of consciousness: if someone attempted to see the “source” of the continuously looped image, to open up the machine, dislocate the camera, and investigate the wiring, etc, the image would disappear. It only exists as a moving, closed circuit happening. Similarly, no amount of perfect neuron position replication, brain mapping, etc, can ever replicate the continuously looping phenomenon of living consciousness; it would be the difference between a singular sun-faded butterfly wing found on the sidewalk to the live magic dance of flapping color.
The visually interesting things happen when the system is imperfect, when there is some slight delta between the camera’s input and the display’s output—and this is, in reality, any and all physical video feedback systems. Modern video cameras and displays are almost perfect, but this “almost” is key. The very slight initial degradation of the image, looped round and round, perpetuates, causing the image to degrade and distort into abstract forms. The mechanism mirrors something like a butterfly effect in that a relatively small change reverberates throughout the whole system, eventually taking over it entirely. Video feedback is the looping trace of degradation, a degradation which does not merely reduce, but transforms the image into ever-new forms.
Single-channel video feedback alone is not enough to create Blair’s characteristic fractal geometries. What is needed is the addition of some sort of mirror-effect, the type where two mirrors face each other and infinitely regress, as in a green room or a Yayoi Kusama. Blair achieves this by feeding multiple displays into one camera. He does this by positioning two screens at a right angle relative to each other, and affixing a piece of teleprompter glass angled at 45° in between them (if this sounds confusing, it is). Together, these two relatively simple recursive phenomena—looping video feedback and inward-facing mirrors—create extraordinarily complex fractals that move, morph, and mesmerize miraculously.
***
The fractals Blair’s machine produces are themselves as visually profound and enigmatic as the means through which they were created by. They all start with some arbitrary source image—be it a picture of a stained glass flamingo or Blair’s own fish tank, it doesn’t matter what, as the machine will put the image into feedback, transforming it into something completely unrecognizable.
Suddenly, the screen is an undulating, fluorescent, abstracted tentacle, multiplying into tinier and tinier tentaclettes against a black background. Then the tentaclettes join back up together into a spinning spiral, now red, that just as quickly breaks apart. Then the form explodes, firework-like, into a shimmering mess of dots that resembles what I imagine the beginning of the universe might have looked like if portrayed by an early computer. Impressionistically blurred clouds of purple, pink, and blue pulse as though driven by the rhythm of a heartbeat. Nothing ever repeats entirely, and yet there is pattern. The most astounding forms are those which uncannily resemble all manner of organic phenomena: jellyfish, sea horses, ferns, romanesco, cell membranes, mitosis, nebulae.
At one point, the white dots begin to coalesce into what looks like the surface of a rippling pool of water shimmering in bright sun, a pattern so specific and hard to portray (hard even to imagine) that it was almost scary seeing it emerge from an arbitrary source image and Blair’s machine. The patterns of the organic formed in front of my eyes at all scales.
The visuals are buttressed by Blair’s choice in music: drugged, trance-inducing psychedelic rock like Dead Meadow’s Beyond the Fields We Know or Girls Against Boys’s Satin Down. Interestingly, Blair’s live operation of the machine would seem to be the inverse of many live musical performances wherein sound is foregrounded and supplemented by absorbing visuals. In the case of Blair’s dizzying fractals (which very much lend themselves to being interpreted in musical terms), we find the music within the visual, not the other way around.
***
On my first encounter with Blair’s work, I was completely and wonderfully unprepared. Without the built-in context of a museum, I encountered a beauty free of pretense, one that flowed towards me on its own volition rather than one that I had to pull out; it was through YouTube, of all places, where I encountered the work of Dave Blair.
When walking into the MET, or the Louvre, or the Getty, or for that matter any gallery show or place that claims to show art worth consuming, there is a built-in expectation that what we are seeing or hearing or touching or tasting is—or better, ought—to be worth our while: someone with a degree in art history and now employed with a curatorial job chose the painting on the wall; sitting next to me at the restaurant, other patrons have paid good money for what must be good food; people are dancing to the music; even the very designation of something as “Art” sets up an expectation.
The American philosopher John Dewey once lamented that “works of art have lost their indigenous status, they have acquired a new one—that of being specimens of fine art and nothing else.” He criticized art in the modern era as having been reduced to a hegemonic “museum conception of art,” wherein art was no longer enmeshed with life and relegated to a separate, detached order.
When, however, we happen to encounter art within the context of our lives, and not the museum, when we encounter art that exceeds the expectation the very word designates in a context free of them, something magical happens. The body is not prepared to receive art. The mind is absent or too full. So when in these rare moments we encounter art of a high order, the senses are shocked, wrecked, and rearranged. When there is no time to prepare our aesthetic-perceptual apparatus for the sensory flood of some new-to-us work of art, the apparatus breaks and requires reconstruction. It is the sort of beauty of a rainbow encountered on a road trip or a hike: it interrupts mid-conversation, asserting itself into our day and life with no warning—the lack of which constitutes the rainbow’s beauty itself.
My latest blessing of such rare unpreparedness came to me in the form of a YouTube video. Now, I have almost nothing good to say about today’s gaggle of social media algorithms. They are echo chamber-inducing, non-curatorial, anti-agential, infinitely time-wasting mechanisms which leave me somehow behind where I began. However, it was against this backdrop of mundanity—the mundanity of my Sunday afternoon—that Dave Blair’s video flashed across my recommended feed. The thumbnail of the video looked to have a car-sized contraption made of wood with multiple screens and cameras affixed to it, with the title of the video reading something like: “Trapping Images in Feedback Loops & Creating Galaxies.” And, well, I clicked. So while I concede that it was the nameless YouTube algorithm that brought to my awareness Dave Blair, his machine, and ultimately the subject of this essay, it was also that algorithm that created the vast grey space against which his art shone so brightly.
While I am almost certain that Dewey would never hold up YouTube as a hero of art being enmeshed in life, I am, after having encountered the work of Dave Blair, even more convinced of Dewey’s theory. Ironically, art outside of “Art” has perhaps the greatest possibility of widening the circle of the aesthetic and bringing people and works that deserve our attention into our awareness. If art criticism is to have any purchase on what we call “Art”—the definition of which precedes any judgment of it—then we need more art criticism focused on what most are not calling “Art.” Art criticism must, therefore, start outside “Art” in order to have the most radical changes to its “inside.”
***
There are generally two parts of Dave Blair’s YouTube videos: explanations about the machine and its design, and the fractal video output that the machine produces set to music. While it is tempting to place the sections of Blair’s videos that explain his machine as mere context to its much more visually interesting fractal output, I want to slow down the impulse to create a binary hierarchy between the “actual art” and explanations about into how it was created.
The overall effect of watching the fractals themselves puts one into a state of continued dazzlement, amazed not only by the images themselves, but by the means with which they were created. Just as one is about to become fully subsumed within the geometrical world of the fractals, hypnotically numbed to the point of sublimity, the video cuts back to Blair explaining some or another part of the machine. And while in most performances the audience generally wants the performing object to continue uninhibited, not interrupted by an explanation of how what is going on is working, in this case, there is an exception.
In spite of the fact that I had, on first watch, damn near no idea what in the world Mr. Dave Blair was talking about, his explanations about his peculiar machine were absolutely entrancing (a word I easily could have saved to describe the actual output of the machine, but which I think his explanations alone deserve). He pointed the camera POV style at various knobs, switches, wires, cameras and screens as if the viewer were following along and keeping pace with his explanations, like a math professor whose confident chalkboard calculations bear decreasingly little resemblance to his students’ understandings. But without the fear of a test, watching a master at work has its own aesthetic quality: something like an awe of dedication.
The many thousands of hours over the years that Blair has put into this machine acted like a ghost surrounding every idiosyncratic piece of knowledge he relayed, their size implied. Indeed, it would seem that Blair’s specific knowledge related to his machine was itself fractal, continuously unfolding to reveal more and more detailed information (did you know, as Blair tells us for example, that shellac, the food-safe coating which he used to finish the wood of the most recent iteration of his machine, comes from the secretions of the lac bug, Kerria Lacca, a tiny scale insect from the forests of India? Did you know that this very finish has been used for decades to coat the surfaces of shiny candies?)
Blair takes the viewer with him for the multifarious problems and resulting creative solutions that he encounters throughout the continuous development of his machine. For example, in one video, he explains that the machine requires both linear and rotational movements for the rods that the cameras are affixed to and which the operator uses to move them. With no obvious commercially available parts, he found German linear bearings (called “linearkugellagers,” I dare you to attempt pronunciation) on eBay, then put those bearings inside another, rotational one. But the movement was too fast, it glided too easily. So he added something called Nyogel 767a to add more friction to the system. Seemingly every small detail required rigorous problem solving.
It is not, however, the specifics of Blair’s problem-solving or mechanism-explanations that were entrancing (after many hours of watching Blair’s videos, I was somewhere around 75% comprehension of how the machine worked. It took an interview with Blair to get somewhere near a full grasp), but rather the sheer volume of minutiae and persistence with which Blair goes at his work. The amount of work and acquired knowledge about the machine and its resulting output make the experience of watching the fractal geometries even more astounding—and thus they should not be considered aesthetically separate from them.
Imagine, if you will, a contemporary painting in an art gallery or museum. But this painting has a video screen next to it, made by the painter herself, detailing how it was made: how, for example, the particular quality of blue in the sky was achieved through the addition of a small amount of green; how the curved, impressionistic flowers at the bottom of the canvas used the painters wrist as a pivot point, but how for the trees, the hand had to float above the canvas; how only one paint binder was able to achieve the correct texture and depth of paint required, etc. Wouldn’t such an explanation have a dramatic effect on the painting itself?
Upon encountering the work of art, explanations like this hypothetical are usually relegated to the paragraph-sized wall text, or after the fact, the art-critical review. But what if it was right there, parallel with the work itself? Made by the artist themselves? In Dave Blair (and, for that matter, many so-called “maker” YouTubers), we have a preliminary example. Without him interjecting his own art, the viewer might miss the craftsmanship and aesthetic quality of the machine itself, which appears both futuristic in its mechanism and traditional in its shellacked, wooden frame.
Blair’s explanations of his own work expand its scale in both directions, zooming the viewer beyond the fractal video output itself out into the machine that created it, out further still into the creator of the machine, and back inward into the significance of the fractals through Blair’s own theory of the universe. The traditionally conceived work of art is something separate from the means of its production—a birth, orphaned—something which, strictly speaking, only stands up as a work of art when framed and glassed. Ultimately, then, Blair and creators like him shift the position of the work of art backward in the ontogenetic timeline, challenging the integrity of the traditional conception.
***
Why, or how, does Blair’s machine warrant God status? How far can wood, cameras, and dedication scale out? Far, it would seem. The dynamics of video feedback are profoundly creative in a way that mirrors the history of the universe and humanity, and Dave Blair’s device has given us visual access to them through its performance of their mechanism. As he explained in an interview with Carlos Farias: “The world we live in is a complex feedback loop. Biological functions operate on feedback loops, and it’s no wonder the images created using video feedback are so organic-looking. Ecosystems, geological systems, and social systems all operate on feedback loops, and they operate according to the inherent rules of that system.” These rules, at least in the case of video feedback, are, however, not self-sustaining. If Blair were to simply turn on the machine, set an image into feedback, and wait, something interesting may happen for a little while, but eventually (or, in most cases, quickly), the image would either fade to black (no information left) or become fully white (too much information takes over the image). Indeed, the whole point of Blair’s machine, its elaborate system of poles and wires, is to allow the user to maintain the image’s proliferation, to, as he puts it, “ride the brightness,” shifting the parameters to keep the image alive, so that something rather than nothing exists. In short, he plays God.
Here we approach Blair’s theory of creation. For Blair, the most fundamental and difficult act of creation is not to make something beautiful or hypnotic or representative of some inner, ineffable idea. It is rather to make anything at all, and to keep it in existence—be it the universe, consciousness, or the continuous existence of his dancing geometries. Anything and everything interesting happens in the “middlespace”—a term borrowed from his collaborator Ty Hardaway. Blair said in the same interview that: “It is right on the edge of death and life where things start talking to each other.”
He explained by way of his machine the history and future of the universe: At first, there was nothing: a black and meaningless expanse, or screen. Then, for whatever reason, someone lights a flame in front of the camera or sets off a big bang (And the earth was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep…And God said, Let there be light; and there was light. -Genesis). This image-information is quickly distorted, becoming jellyfish, cells, galaxies, etc, until the run ends, and there is once again nothing. The original information is simultaneously essential for the existence of all else, and yet in another sense, completely arbitrary as to its content. At first, there is nothing. Then there is something. “The Video feedback image exists because it exists,” writes Blair. That something perpetuates itself until, once again, there is nothing. The important part was that there was something at all in between. In my conversation with Blair, he compared both the universe and his machine to an explosion slowed down:
“Imagine a stick of dynamite exploding. The moment after the explosion, there is nothing. And before the explosion went off, there was also nothing, no motion. But imagine the explosion slowed down a billion times. There, inside the explosion, during it, everything interesting happens.”
As he explained further during the interview with Carlos Farias:
“We are living in a moment of a vast explosion. People talk about the Big Bang as if it happened. But no, it’s still happening! We are in the middle of this interesting part where it is going to be finished at some point…this fraction of a moment…[when] all that’s happening, life and people and planets, going to the grocery store…are going on because we’re right in that sweet zone. Just like video feedback, right in that sweet zone where interesting things happen.”
The God Machine is the physical-aesthetic manifestation of Blair’s theory of the universe. It is itself a little universe—a petit monde. Every world, Blair explained to me, has rules. The universe has math and physics, and the God Machine has various technical parameters: limits to the range of the knobs, cameras, and positions. Every universe thus operates according to the inherent rules of the system, but it is also those very rules which, counterintuitively, afford the possibility for freedom.
In his essay, The Play of Art, the German philosopher Hans-Georg Gadamer wrote that: “The playfulness of human games is constituted by the imposition of rules and regulations that only count as such within the closed world of play…What is the nature of the validity that both binds and limits in this way?… A certain self-imposed limitation of our freedom seems to belong to the very structure of culture.”
The rules of the game of life beget its freedom, its movement. Play, freedom, the spontaneous movements of human activity, the universe, and Blair’s dancing fractals are possible only in relation to and under some set of governing rules (John Conway’s “Game of Life” comes to mind as a celebrated example of this phenomenon). The rules can be simple, but as long as there is some looping, distorting feedback—in evolutionary biology, astronomy, or video—resulting complexity ensues.
***
The more of Dave Blair’s videos one watches, the more one fully understands what is really is going on within the contraption, the more unbelievable the resulting video output becomes. Many artists have achieved hypnotic, trance-inducing video art on the phenomenological scale through any number of techniques, but few are able to enact the process of life itself, to bewilder the viewer on all scales. What we are seeing resulting from Blair’s machine are, strangely enough, the fundamental processes of the organic.
Consider, by way of contrast, Refik Anadol’s piece Unsupervised, a video work which would at first seem to ally itself with Blair’s. It was exhibited on MoMA’s ground floor in 2023 and used many complex AI algorithms and an extremely powerful custom-designed computer to run them. The piece’s algorithm used MoMA’s vast digital database of artworks as its initial inputs, and Andol claimed that the AI was “dreaming” and “exploring hallucination” (the full title of the piece was “Unsupervised—Machine Hallucinations—MoMA—Fluid Dreams,” no doubt claiming some level of organicity through its human metaphors). The resulting moving images were, one might contend, equally absorptive, unending, and to some extent transfixingly organic.
We have here two machines creating two sets of organic-looking video output, and yet they could not be further apart. Unsupervised is of course wildly supervised. And how could it not be? Rules, as I have mentioned, are essential and unavoidable. Because Andol’s piece was created with a computer that used many thousands of lines of code specifying various parameters in an attempt to replicate, with the help of AI, organic-looking (for example) waves, it appears as nothing more than a well-executed representation of the organic. The seeming organicity of Andol’s piece is undermined by the means of its creation. The organic patterns that emerge in Andol’s piece—reverberating, bouncing globs of color which appear to be preforming a fluid-dynamics simulation, webs of lines that resemble maps of synapse connections, amalgamated combinations of paintings, etc—are all the result of a highly calculated and prescribed set of rules designed to look like organic phenomena.
Blair’s piece, on the other hand, achieves its organic forms through a much simpler basic mechanism (though the way that mechanism has been honed, perfected, and executed is no less complex). Blair’s piece is so naked; we see the bones of the machine right there in front of us making the images—indeed in Blair’s YouTube videos, as mentioned, he interjects the machine’s video outputs with footage of the machine itself. Andol, on the other hand, attempts to show the viewer the inside of the machine through—supposedly—an interface of what the machine is “thinking.” Travis Diehl, concluding his review of the piece for The New York Times, described it: “Then, every few minutes, the big screen flickers, as if straining, and the soothing colors turn into an array of charts tracking things like “energy difference” and the “current latent noise field.” Under “GAN video analysis” there are thumbnails of the jade lumps, gold lozenges and coal-colored squares “dreamed up” by the software. It’s like the way hacking is portrayed in a Hollywood film like “Jurassic Park,” with slick but simulated interfaces, so as not to bore audiences with the reality of coding.
At MoMA, home to some of the smartest art in recent history, these theatrical peeks under the machine’s hood feel patronizing. Does it really need to flicker? Is it working that hard?…“Unsupervised” is only a screen saver.” Andol, perhaps aware of how inorganic his images were in truth (or worse, believing they were, in fact, organic), felt the need to show the “brains” of his machine through the above pictured “thinking” screen which interjected the AI’s output, but which in actuality manufactured them, too. In doing so, ironically, he kept the mechanism a sealed black box. We see here two distinctly different sort of Gods: one real, one a sort of puppet.
What appears miraculous when looking at Blair’s intensely organic shapes is that they were made with two very simple, analog mechanisms, and the movements of Blair’s hands—and nothing more! The proportion of initial simplicity of the system to resulting complexity of output is, shall we say, organic, life-creating. Unlike Andol’s piece, watching the formation of Blair’s fractal geometries proliferate as Blair moves the various rods back and forth, there is a sense that we are witnessing the process of creation itself, not merely a representation or highly manufactured simulation of it.
We know how the organic works, but the mechanism itself does not touch life’s profundity. We can say, in theory, that random mutation, looped in feedback, traveled through time from the primordial soup to you and me. We can say, in theory, that Blair’s initial image, looped in video feedback, combined with a recursive mirror-effect produces the fractal geometries. What takes my breath away however is this incomprehensible gap—a gap in full view in Blair’s machine.
***
In the only other meaningful piece of writing on Blair I could find, someone by the username of Otter Meat wrote: “That the geometry of life can be generated through this era-spanning combination of modern video technology and wood and iron available centuries ago, brings into question the genesis of life. Is life a nearly impossible product of great sophistication? Or does it fall from the random and accidental twist of a wrist? Or is it something in between? A single line of code allowed to replicate across the inevitable random and irreproducible mutations that occur with the slow passage of time? The sculpture and its captain either play god, prove god, or kill god.”
If I may attempt an answer, dear Otter Meat, I might say—yes, yes to both! Life is precisely the product of a sophisticated randomness. Or, the sophistication of life lies precisely in its random and accidental twisting of the wrist.
As to God, yes, and yes again; the sculpture both kills and proves God. If life or video feedback fractals can be produced by random mutation or a simple set of rules embodied in one man’s machine, then surely God has died and been replaced by chaos. But if looping feedback, through chaos, can produce life and beauty, then surely God exists, for the gap is far too wide. Or—maybe this paradox, this gap, this irreconcilability, is where God, or the lack thereof, lies.
***
Let me at this point emphasize another disproportion: that between Dave Blair’s current following and his continued effort, import, sophistication, and artistic and technical prowess. Blair initially learned about the existence of video feedback in high school when he found a seemingly inconsequential reference to it buried somewhere in the 777 pages of Douglas Hofstadter’s notorious Gödel, Escher, Bach (yes, Dave Blair is the type of person who read Gödel, Escher, Bach in high school). In 1988, when Blair was in college, he began actually experimenting with video feedback and later created the first preliminary version of his machine in 2003. During the pandemic, he put on his mask, went to Home Depot, and risked his life for plywood, eventually creating the first fractal-capable version. It was only just this year that Blair declared, in an uploaded YouTube video title, that “The Light Herder Video Feedback Fractal Device Finally Achieves Perfection”. Nam June Paik, the father of video art, as well as Bill Viola, Paik’s contemporary, revolutionary incarnation, both experimented with video feedback. But neither took it to its full potential. His intervention was not so much theoretical as it was practical and technical.
As of the writing of this essay, Blair has only around 5000 subscribers on YouTube, an amount that would be a rounding error to even the smallest view-count YouTube professionals. Beyond this, there is a spattering of articles on various blogs and maker websites. But, as Blair told me: “I consider my videos like messages in a bottle. So—I’m making a lot of them and putting a lot out. Some get a few hundred views, others a few thousands. But I’m not really looking for millions of views. I’m looking for the right people to see the videos. I’m looking for people who appreciate it on a deeper level, for other excited people to collaborate with.”
How refreshing! We all know the prototypical story of the gifted, unrecognized artist who in their lifetime never achieved the recognition they so deserved. But is this really such a tragic story? Could it be, rather, that the few close collaborators and admirers are what really counts? The art-world’s intertwinement with the attention economy has a rather hegemonic, capitalist conception of success.
So to witness myself, first hand, such quality of work and years of dedication with so little recognition, my faith was strangely strengthened. How many other artists are out there who have been working for decades, honing their craft in the dark? How many pursue beauty for its own sake? With no regard for external validation? When will I stumble into another?
Dave Blair has made my writing of this essay seem less meaningless. Perhaps I am Dave Blair to another Armaan Ahmed. Perhaps if Blair had spent his entire adult excess time and money building this machine only for me to see it, perhaps it would still have been worth it.
***
While there is undoubtedly an element of chaos involved in the creation of Blair’s fractal geometries, he has, through many years of operation, honed the ability to direct the chaos, to nudge it in some direction that it can proliferate towards (wouldn’t this be an interesting sort of God?). Through all his years building and iterating the machine, he has spent just as much time learning how to use it, fitting the machine’s dowels and knobs to his body schema. He has had to simultaneously design the instrument while learning how to play it. Perhaps, in truth, this is the condition of every artist who presses on the edge of the possible, no matter how well established the medium or well-designed the instrument. Each must invent a whole new way of playing, in addition to a whole new thing to play.
***
“I’ve always thought someone should study this. And it turns out it’s me,” Blair wrote somewhere on his extremely detailed website documenting his every iteration since the machine’s first incarnation.
Perhaps it is conviction that has kept the feedback loop of humanity going as long as it has. I imagine Blair in 1988, camera in hand, accidentally pointing his camera at the screen of its output, discovering for the first time what it felt like to create video feedback. I imagine the discovery as clumsy as the beginning of life itself. How did he know his feedback loop of history would last long enough for the machine’s eventual creation? That his efforts would fruit? How do any of us? It seems that we must believe, with no evidence, that the images will keep evolving, that some operator will change the knobs just in time for the image not to go black.