This is where I come to not know things. Science gives me frameworks and answers; art gives me the questions I didn't know I had. Somewhere between the two, I find out something about myself. I am not sure what this page is yet. It is a place where rhythm becomes image, where a sensor becomes an instrument, where a research question dissolves into a feeling. Come in.
Perception is more malleable than we think. You don't need altered states to experience a bending of reality, you just need to exhaust the right part of your visual system.
Instructions: Open the video in fullscreen. Look at the center for 20 seconds. Then, focus on an object around you.
Explanation: This piece exploits a well-known perceptual mechanism: prolonged exposure to a moving pattern fatigues the motion-sensitive cells in the retina and visual cortex. When you look away, the opposing cells briefly dominate, and the world appears to move in the opposite direction. The effect lasts only seconds, but in those seconds, something ordinary becomes strange.
What's beyond the door?
Aldous Huxley borrowed the question from William Blake: if the doors of perception were cleansed, everything would appear as it is, infinite. We are not interested in the answer. We are interested in the threshold. The moment you stop holding on and let the rhythm carry you somewhere you can't quite name. Dissociation, when it is gentle, feels like this. Not absence, but a loosening. The self becomes porous. You float. The beat continues underneath, steady and indifferent, and you wonder — not anxiously, but openly — what is on the other side.
The door stays closed. The passage is the point.
If you could hear a video, what would it sound like?
Pixel Piano scans a bar across a video frame and converts what it finds into piano notes — brightness mapped to pitch, position to timing. It is the opposite of Beat Reactor: instead of imposing rhythm onto an image, it asks the image to reveal its own.
In the test recording, flowers move in wind. Up close, the movement seems chaotic — petals flickering, stems bending unpredictably. But zoom out, and the chaos resolves into something rhythmic. The wind has a pulse. The flowers were always playing a piece; this just made it audible.
Sound and vision reach us through different senses, but rhythm connects them. When a visual pulse locks onto a beat, something in the brain clicks into place and the two streams feel like one.
Beat Reactor was built for a DJ performance: a generative visual where noise parameters respond in real time to beat detection, synchronizing the auditory and visual domains artificially. The result is psychedelic not because it distorts reality, but because it makes a hidden synchrony visible. What the music is doing in your body, the visual is doing on screen.