interact with yourself

This idea is based largely on an idea published in "The book of highs; 250 ways to alter consciousness without drugs", Edward Rosenfeld, Quadrangle, 1973.

Attach a video camera (a camcorder will do fine) as an input to a DVR (TiVo or Replay TV). Place the camera on top of the TV, both facing the viewer. Set up the DVR to make the camera the current video source. You are now staring at yourself. Hit the pause button. Wait a few seconds. Un-pause it. You are now staring at yourself a few seconds in the past.

Chances are, your first reaction will be to smile. After a few seconds, your image will smile back at you.

You will then react to that. Your next reaction might be to laugh, to stare more intently at the image, whatever. After a few seconds, that reaction will display. You will then react to that.

And so on; each reaction loops back to provoke yet another reaction. You are now interacting with yourself. Get to know you. You should; you are an interesting person and you should get to know yourself better. It'd be good for both of you.

The pause interval doesn't have to be as short as a few seconds. In fact, try other intervals; try 30 seconds, a minute, 5 minutes. The kind of interaction you get can vary with the interval you use. "Playback delay" is BTW a more accurate term than pause interval.

Set this up at your next party. I suggest you leave it in a room by itself, so that people can experience it alone if they like, or with others. This also lets people control whether they choose to interact this way, which otherwise would invade privacy to some extent.

Rosenfeld's 1973 book described the setup of two videotape machines sharing a single tape. The machine with the video camera recorded onto the tape, the machine with the TV played back the tape, and the two machines were a few feet from each other, thus the length of the tape determined the playback delay.

Needless to say this was impossible on home equipment, and a daunting challenge even for an AV whiz. Thus I doubt it was done many times. The sheer technical difficulty kept it just an interesting idea. But today it could be done at millions of homes in America. The equipment is just a PVR and video camera.

A variation described by Rosenfeld, best limited to parties where everyone accepts it as an intense, experimental experience: set up several cameras, say one in each room, each attached to a remote monitor located elsewhere in the house, using playback delays of say at least 30 minutes. That way everyone experiences everyone including themselves both live and via tape delay randomly at all times. So this isn't you interacting with yourself any more, not an individual interacting with himself, but the entire group interacting with the entire group. Get to know you. All of you.