Emergence app for iPhone and iPad

Emergence is an experiment in generative line art that takes input from: the iPad video camera, your music library album covers and your Twitter feed to provide an ever-changing procession of sound-reactive imagery.

The overall effect is deeply psychedelic.

NB: If you have photosensitive epilepsy (PSE) you shouldn’t view this app. Some modes feature frequent, rhythmic, high contrast colour flashes and rapidly changing imagery

What I’m doing here is flirting with the boundaries between form and formlessness. I’m playing with the complex web of associative activity that occurs in response to loosely-formed input that ultimately results in the experiential magic of pareidolia and more generally, hallucination.

Emergence began as an attempt to capture the moment when, via gaze based meditation, the world around you dissolves into a scintillating profusion of points. It is from this chaotic breakdown of form into a buzzing, boundary-dissolving formlessness that our most powerful visionary experiences ultimately emerge. If you are a practitioner of dream yoga you will see this sequence play itself out multiple times a night behind closed eyelids.

When designing Emergence, it was important from the outset that there be as much novelty as possible in the visual output. I didn’t want any static, set pieces. That’s why everything you see comes from outside the app itself. The base image is a straight feed from your iPad’s video camera. I ended up using lines instead of points as either my brain or the hardware isnt quite up to the challenge of rendering enough dynamic points per frame to produce the effect Im looking for. The primitive line-work produced is then shaded according to the acoustic environment you present the app with, whether that be via microphone or the internal music player. This backdrop, with a heavy emphasis on the lovely noise the camera sensors pick up (especially in darkened environments), is interleaved with abstract representations of your music library’s album artworks each time a new track is played.

In search of further novelty – of the truly unexpected – I then hooked Emergence into the app user’s Twitter feed. The way this works is that, every 5 minutes or so, Emergence will check the last 5 tweets in your Twitter home timeline. It then follows any web links within these tweets and trawls for usable images. Any images found become the source for its highly abstracted line-art output.

I wouldn’t necessarily call the end result “beautiful”. But what it does do, is place an internal question mark in the visual cortex. What is the image being presented here? What patterns can be made of this? Do you see what I see? In so doing, it steers a reflective mind to question the reality behind our visual interpretation of the experienced world.

I made Emergence primarily to complement my own meditation practices. I place it somewhere between 3 and 4 meters away, facing me, and queue up an appropriate playlist. I choose “twist” mode and then just sit in stillness and gaze.

Since Emergence is completely dependent on the input you provide, it is up to the user to offer an environment that will maximise its visual potential. It is also important to note that there is a fundamental lack of control over the sites trawled for imagery. If someone you follow on Twitter posts a dubious link containing dubious imagery, then dubious imagery abstracted will be your result. So in this sense, caveat emptor, and hence the 17+ rating. If this especially worries you, you can turn off the Twitter image feed via the options menu.

Please see my website for a "how to use" FAQ. Note also that the duration between displayed Twitter images may vary greatly. Delays of 30 mins or more are possible and are typically the result of Emergence being unable to derive suitable images from the most recent posts in your Twitter timeline. This fundamental lack of control over final output is an intentional part of the design of Emergence.